


Doing Time

by IsolaVirtuosa



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-05
Updated: 2015-08-05
Packaged: 2018-04-13 03:26:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 28,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4505922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IsolaVirtuosa/pseuds/IsolaVirtuosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the war, the gundam pilots and their collaborators are arrested and sent to prison.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

            “Welcome to ESUN Maximum Security Prison,” the guard announced as we shuffled through the gate.

            Once we were all through, the gate slammed shut behind us.

            And just like that, I knew there was no turning back.  This was where I would spend the rest of my life.

            Our leg shackles and handcuffs were removed, and we were all sent off to get our linens and move into our cells.

            It was dark, I noted, as the guard led me to Cellblock D.  It reminded me of space.

            “This is it,” the guard said, motioning to the other guard behind the door to buzz us in.

            Seeming relieved to pass me off to the new guard, the guard I was with quickly retreated back into the prison.

            “So you’re Yuy,” the new guard said.  His nametag read ‘Taylor’.  “Follow me.”

            I followed him into the cellblock.  There were two rows of cells, all open, but only a couple of prisoners milling around.

            “This is yours,” he said, gesturing to the cell at the very end of the block.  “Your roommate should be back from work detail shortly.”  He rolled his eyes as he spoke.

            I stepped into the cell, dropping my linens onto the empty bottom bunk.  It stank of piss like the rest of the block, and my roommate’s belongings were carelessly strewn around the room, but it was still a lot nicer than the cells I’d been thrown in during the war.

            The guard was already gone, so for lack of anything else to do, I made up my bed.  I sat on the bottom bunk, looking around the tiny hole in the wall that would be home until I died.  There were bunk beds, a toilet, a sink, a mirror, and a small desk.  There was a box on the floor, open and overflowing with clothes and books.  That was all.

            I stood up abruptly, walking over to the box.  I picked up the blue rosary that was hanging over the side, running the well-worn and familiar beads through my fingers.

            Someone was approaching me from behind.

            I tensed up, ready for a fight.

            “Hey,” he said, and I immediately relaxed, sinking back into the arms that wrapped around my waist.

            “Hey,” I replied, turning my head to the side so I could look into his blue eyes.

            Duo stared back, quiet and guileless for a moment.  A soft smile spread across his features, and he pressed his nose to mine.  “I missed you,” he breathed against my lips.

            “Me, too,” I said, pressing a light kiss to his mouth.  I had acted on instinct, but as I pulled away I wondered if it was a mistake.  It had been so long.

            Duo smiled that dopily happy smile of his before the slyness suddenly came flooding back.  “Already acting like the place is yours, huh?” he said, reaching out to take the rosary from my hands.

            I let him take it, stepping out of his arms.  “I was surprised that my new roommate owned the exact same religious artifact as the infamous terrorist Duo Maxwell.”

            “And how would you know what kind of religious artifacts Duo Maxwell secretly keeps in his bedroom?” Duo asked with a teasing grin as he tossed the rosary back into the box.

            “I’ve been in there a time or two,” I said, sitting down on the bed.

            Duo snorted, sitting next to me and bumping my knee with his.

            “You’re okay?” I asked, dropping my hand over his.

            “You know me,” he said, with a shrug.  “But, Christ, Heero, consecutive life sentences?”

            “I don’t think there’s actually a difference between one life sentence or two,” I pointed out.  “Either way, we’re not getting out.”

            “Fucking Manfredo,” Duo muttered, turning his hand over and lacing our fingers together.  Duo did not care for the ESUN President who’d had us all arrested.  “You save the fucking world twice and he dumps your ass in this hellhole for it.”

            I wanted to tell him that it was what I deserved, but I knew that would only get him even more riled up.  I held his hand instead, the comforting warmth of his fingertips tangled with mine soothing away my own weariness of the situation.

            “Are the others here?” I asked, deciding it was time to change the subject.

            “Yeah, Cellblock D is for all us war criminals,” Duo said, pulling his hand away.  “Which is pretty hilarious, because we’ve got guerillas, ozzies, and feds all caged up together.”  He kicked off his shoes and flopped back onto my bed, his arms tucked behind his head.  “I can’t believe you’re here…  I mean, we haven’t really talked since… you know…”

            “The day the police raided the scrapyard?” I offered, gazing down at him.  The last time I had seen him in person was when I testified at his trial ten months earlier.  We’d exchanged some pointed stares and long glances, but hadn’t been able to say more than a brief ‘hello’ to one another.

            He looked so different from that day, slouched in his seat next to his lawyer in an orange prison jumpsuit and handcuffs.  He had filled out, his blue button-up prison shirt straining over his biceps, and there was a hard set to his face that had been there since I’d first met him, but now seemed more pronounced somehow.

            “Yeah,” Duo said, playing with the frayed hem of his black wifebeater.  “Talk about getting caught with your pants down.”

            “We would have been wearing pants if it hadn’t been so damn hot,” I said, thinking back to that sweltering day on L2.  Something had gone wrong with the colony’s climate control, and Duo and I had given up on our work in the scrapyard to instead sit in the kitchen in our underwear with ice packs on the backs of our necks.

            “I heard Manfredo ordered the colony engineers to do it,” Duo muttered, a dark look in his eyes.  “Q said the same thing happened on L4 before the raid on the Winner Corporation.  Was probably gonna sweat the whole colony out until he had what he wanted.”

            “What’s done is done,” I said.

            Duo rolled his eyes.  “You fucking Asians and your zen bullshit.”

            “So you and Wufei are getting along well?”

            “Christ, Wufei,” Duo said, stretching his leg over my lap.  “All he does all day is fucking meditate or do his damn katas.”

            “And what do you do all day?” I asked, rubbing his foot.  Once again it was instinct, but Duo’s purr of pleasure assured me that it was more than welcome.

            “Eat, shit, ’n sleep,” Duo said, eyelids lowering.  “God, why are you so good at that?”

            “A careful study of anatomy,” I said, digging my thumb into the arch of his foot.

            “Mmm okay,” Duo said, eyes sliding fully shut.  “Did I tell you how glad I am that you’re here?  Well, I mean, not glad that you’re stuck rotting away in this shithole.  But, you know.  That you’re here.  With me.  Giving me a great foot massage.”

            “Duly noted.”

            Duo was actually quiet for a while, the only sign that he was still alive his happy little squirms when I did something he liked.

            “I was expecting to walk in on something more… lascivious.”

            I’d heard the guard approaching before he spoke.  The lazy opening of Duo’s eyes showed he wasn’t startled by the sudden pronouncement, either.

            “Fuck you, Hernandez,” Duo said, giving the dark-haired guard an easy-going grin.

            “Fuck you, too, Maxwell.  So, you gonna introduce me to your girlfriend?”

            I raised an eyebrow at that.

            “I prefer the term ‘bitch’,” Duo said breezily.

            I turned my raised eyebrow on him.

            Duo grinned at me, not taking his eyes off of mine as he said, “Hernandez, this is Yuy.  Yuy, Hernandez.  He’s not so bad for a shitty hack.”

            “‘Not so bad’?” Hernandez repeated with a snort.  “That’s all the thanks I get for letting you ladies room together?”

            “Whaddya want, a gold medal?” Duo asked.

            “It’d be nice,” Hernandez said, turning to leave.

            “Yeah, yeah,” Duo said, raising his middle finger to Hernandez’s retreating back.

            “Duo?” I said, continuing to work my fingers into the sole of his foot.

            “Mm?”

            “Am I your prison bitch?”

            Duo let out a bark of laughter.  “I don’t know, do you want to be?” he asked, raising an inviting eyebrow at me.

            I stared at him.

            Duo grinned, sitting up straight and dropping his feet back to the floor.  “The guys should be back from work soon.”

            “Why aren’t you at work?”

            “’Cause I bribed Hernandez to bring me back as soon as you got here,” he answered cheerfully, sliding back into his boots.  “Had to help my new cellmate get acquainted to prison life.”

            I watched as he stood up and reached under his pillow, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.  He suddenly seemed far away.

            “Want one?” he asked, offering the pack to me.

            I shook my head.  Duo didn’t used to smoke.  Now the smell of it lingered on his skin.

            There was a loud buzzing sound, and the gate clanged open.

            “Look, I know you can take care of yourself, but keep your head down, okay?” Duo said, turning his head to breathe his smoke away from me.  “Some of these meatheads are holding onto some stupid grudges, and I don’t want you getting sent to solitary or some dumb shit.”

            “You’re telling _me_ to keep my head down?” I asked, eyeing him.

            “I’ve been here a lot longer than you, and I know how things work,” Duo said, nudging my knee with the heel of his boot.  “I don’t mean to shock you or anything, but you tend to rub people the wrong way.”

            “Really, me?”

            “See, you’re doing it right now,” Duo said, grounding his boot more harshly into my knee.  “Leave the smartassery to me.”

            “That is not even a word.”

            “Quiet, bitch.”

            I stared at him for a long moment.

            Duo continued to puff on his cigarette, grinning impishly all the while.

            I turned away, trying not to smile back as I focused on the approaching presence.

            “Heero.”

            “Trowa.”

            We exchanged nods.  Trowa looked about the same, just taller and broader.

            I’d seen him on L2 a few months before we were all arrested.  The circus had come to town, so Duo and I went to watch.  After the show, Trowa had found us in the crowd.  He let us sit in his trailer while he finished cleaning up.  He brought us some tea, and we talked for a while.  He never asked anything about how Duo and I had ended up coming there together, how we sat so that we were always touching, how our eyes often caught in lingering stares.  He just gave us that Trowa look of his, and I knew that he knew.

            Sitting in the trailer had reminded me of after I’d detonated Wing.  I’d stared at the very same wall I was looking at then for hour upon hour, getting pushed back into bed by Catherine every time I tried to get up.  So I’d continued to stare at the wall, thinking about New Edwards and all the mistakes I’d made since the start of Operation Meteor.

            Duo did most of the talking that night.  Trowa was more of a listener than a talker.

            Even now, he just stood there, regarding me in what we both considered a comfortable silence.

            Duo didn’t believe in comfortable silences.  “Hey, Tro, man, nice of you to stop by,” he said, crossing the cell and clapping Trowa on the shoulder.  “Where’s your shadow?”

            “Meeting,” Trowa said.

            “And you’re not there with him?”

            “He told me to go ahead.  Rashid is with him.”

            “Oh, _Rashid_ is with him,” Duo said.

            Trowa frowned at him.

            The amount of time I had spent with Duo and Trowa together was limited, but even when Trowa was throwing Duo into prisons, I’d never sensed tension like this between them.

            Trowa’s eyes met mine.  He was telling me to be careful.

            I nodded.

            Trowa’s gaze shifted to Duo, then he turned around and left.

            “What was that about?” I asked.

            “What was what about?” Duo asked, stretching his arms and rolling his neck.

            A year was a long time to be away from someone.

            A buzzer sounded and Hernandez’s voice bellowed, “Count!”

            “Come on,” Duo said, stepping outside of the cell and slouching in front of the door.

            I stood next to him, watching as the guard strolled by each cell, announcing our prisoner numbers.

            “Hey there, Fish.”

            I realized that the prisoner standing outside the cell across from ours was addressing me.  I looked at him.

            “So you’re the one,” he said, smiling at me coldly.  He had the look of an officer, used to intimidating people into following his orders.

            “Fuck off, Reynolds,” Duo said, smiling his threat at the other man.

            “Oh, that’s right, you gundam shits stick together,” Reynolds said, smiling back at Duo.

            “Good ol’ colony boys gotta stick together,” Duo said, his voice adding meaning to the words that I didn’t follow.

            Reynolds looked like he was about to retort, when the guard Taylor interrupted.  “Something the matter, ladies?”

            “Nope,” Duo said, smiling at him easily.

            “No problem here,” Reynolds said with a shrug.

            Taylor read off our prisoner numbers, then went back down the line to the guard station.  A buzzer sounded and Duo moved back into the cell.

            I followed him, casting a glance back at Reynolds.

            Reynolds glared at me, then dragged his finger across his neck.

            I raised an eyebrow at him.  Death threats weren’t very impressive to me.

            Duo grabbed my arm and yanked me into the cell.  “Jesus, I told you to keep your damn head down.”

            “I didn’t do anything,” I said, feeling a bit sullen.

            “Don’t look at that guy, in fact don’t look at anyone,” Duo said.  “You always have this damn look on your face like you’re gonna kill someone.  That shit’s gonna get you into trouble here.”

            “He knew me,” I said, casting a glance over a Reynold’s cell.  “He has it out for me.  Why?”

            Duo sighed, pulling his braid over his shoulder and playing with the end of it.  “Look, shit from the outside has its way of working into these walls, but if you keep your head down, it can blow over.  That asshole was a fed with a hard on for Noventa, so when it came out at your trial that you were the one who killed him, well… ya know.”

            “So he wants revenge for Noventa?”

            “Yeah, which is pretty fuckin’ dumb since Noventa was all about peace and nonviolence and shit, and yet this guy thinks that a nice way to honor his memory would be to shank you in the back.”

            “Like how Quinze and Barton thought a nice way to honor the real Heero Yuy’s memory was to drop a colony on the Earth and kill millions of people?”

            “Yeah, like that,” Duo said, his voice slightly drowned out by the buzzer.  “Come on, let’s go get dinner.”

            After we were herded to the cafeteria, I felt the eyes of the room fall on me.  I looked out at the room, surveying the glaring eyes that met mine.

            Duo elbowed me in the side.  “I told you not to look at anyone.”  He turned his own gaze out to the crowd, staring down anyone who dared to look at us.

            “Then what are you doing?” I asked, following him into the food line.  The men behind the counter all looked like they were sizing me up.

            “I can look at whoever I want, I have the rep to back it up,” Duo said, handing me a tray.  “You do not.”

            “It seems to me like I’ve already got a reputation,” I said, holding up my tray when Duo did and receiving a spoonful of slop into each compartment of my tray.

            “Your rep on the outside and your prison rep are two different things,” Duo said.  “You gotta prove yourself here, and proving yourself usually involves ending up in the hole, which like I told you before, I don’t want to see happening.”

            “So you had to prove yourself?” I asked, taking my tray and following Duo over to an empty table.  I saw Wufei sitting alone on the opposite side of the room, but Duo made no move to acknowledge him.

            “Yeah, I had to prove myself,” Duo said, giving me a smile that was more of a grimace.  He picked up his spoon and started to eat.

            I studied his face, waiting for more.

            “You better hurry up and eat, this shit tastes even worse when it’s lukewarm.”

            I picked up my own spoon and started eating.  The taste didn’t really register for me.  Eating was a function that had to be done to stay alive.

            Three trays dropped onto the table next to us, amid the loud chatter of strong L2 accents.

            “Mind if we sit here, Maxwell?”

            “Sit your asses down, boys,” Duo said.

            I tried not to laugh.  None of the three men were younger than 30, and were definitely not what I would consider ‘boys’, yet barely legal Duo Maxwell seemed to be calling the shots.

            “Yuy, this is Hobbs,” he said, gesturing to a buff blond man, “Finelli,” he said, indicating a short, dark-haired man who was almost equally buff, “and Simpers,” he said, pointing to a blond man who looked like a sumo wrestler.

            I nodded to them.

           They all gave me friendly greetings, unlike the hostile stares I’d been getting from everyone else in the prison.

            “We all work in the ladies’ dress factory,” Duo said.  “I’ve been pulling to get you assigned there.”

            “There’s a lot of enjoyment to be had in making ladies’ dresses?” I asked, side-eyeing him.

            “I take great pride in my work,” Duo said, with the kind of wink, wink, nudge, nudge look that told me he had something going on the side in the ladies’ dress factory.

            I ate dinner quietly, listening to Duo and his ‘boys’ talk endlessly.

            Duo showed me where to put our trays and moved to leave, but I went over to where Wufei was sitting.

            “Heero,” he said, looking up from the book he was reading.

            “Wufei,” I replied, sitting next to him.

            Duo sighed and sat across from us.

            “So you’ve finally joined us,” Wufei said with a wry smile.

            “Couldn’t wait to get here.”

            “You don’t belong here.”

            Wufei’s black eyes regarded me sincerely.

            He was the only one of us who hadn’t gone through a trial.  He’d simply pled guilty to all the charges brought up against him and accepted his life sentence without question.  His part in the Barton uprising still weighed on him, and after the dissolution of the Preventers, serving his time in prison was the only way he had to alleviate his guilt.

            “What about me, Wu?” Duo asked, his smile cruel.

            “That’s a question to ask yourself, Maxwell,” Wufei said.

            Duo snorted.  “You and your new age bullshit.”

            “You should try meditating with me in the morning.”

            “Yeah, I’m all set,” Duo said, standing up.  “Come on, Heero, let’s go back.”

            Duo was already halfway out the door.  “Wufei,” I said, nodding to him.

            “Heero,” he said, returning the nod.

            I followed Duo to the door, and a guard escorted us and some other prisoners back to the cellblock.

            “What now?” I asked, staring around our cell.

            “We get locked up in a couple of hours, so you wanna hit the gym or something?” Duo suggested.

            I wasn’t particularly a gym person, but I went along with Duo anyway.

            “You can use the mats to do your usual,” Duo said, gesturing over to the back corner of the gym.

            I started my routine of pushups and crunches, watching as Duo went over to the weight machine.  He really was broader now, the definition in his arms clear every time he flexed.

            Before, when we’d been on L2, we’d never seen the point of a gym.  Both of us were naturally strong, our bodies toned from manual labor.

            Lots of men approached Duo, usually jovially, with a quick exchange of banter.  But some were more furtive, heads bowed as their eyes looked every which way.

            I watched silently, continuing my routine.

            There were eyes on me from all corners of the room.

            Duo continued talking, always keeping a cheerful smile on his face.  But there was a threat in his eyes.

            No one approached me.

            We went back to the cellblock.

            Wufei was alone in his cell, reading a book.

            Further down the line, I saw Trowa, Rashid, and a man wearing a turban talking together.

            The turban-wearing man was petit, almost feminine, and when he turned around, pale blue eyes met mine.

            “Quatre,” I said.

            “Heero,” he replied, smiling warmly.  He approached me quickly, first giving me a firm handshake before wrapping me into a hug.  “As-salamu alaykum, my brother.”

            I accepted the hug passively.

            “I wish we could have met again under better circumstances,” he said, finally pulling away.

            I nodded.

            “If you’ve got time in the morning, you’re welcome to join our study group,” Quatre said.  Then he turned to give Duo a meaningful look.  “Of course, you’re invited, too.”

            “Yeah, yeah, Quat, sure,” Duo said.  “Come on, Heero, we’ve got count soon.”

            I followed Duo back to our cell.  “When did Quatre get so…?”

            “Religious?” Duo supplied.  “Man, I don’t know.  Sometime during his trial he started wearing a turban and throwing himself on the floor three times a day to pray.  I thought it was a shtick like my priest thing, but now he’s fuckin’ leading all the Muslims in the prison.”

            “Do Muslims wear turbans?” I murmured.

            “Like I know anything about religion,” Duo said, playing with the crucifix hanging around his neck.

            I reached out and touched his hand.

            He stopped fidgeting, turning his steady gaze on me.

            “Everyone’s changed,” I said softly.

            “Prison does that to a man.”

            “We’re still just teenagers, aren’t we?”

            “I don’t think we’re just anything, Heero.”

            I tightened my grip on his hand.  “Has this changed, too?”

            “I don’t think so,” Duo said, eyes softening.  The only time I ever saw Duo’s more vulnerable side was when it came to our relationship.

            “It’s been a year.”

            “I still feel the same.  You?”

            “I feel like I can finally breathe,” I said.

            Duo smiled at me, wrapping me in a hug with his free arm.

            A buzzer sounded and the word, “Count!” echoed through the concrete.

            Duo and I stepped out of our cell and waited to be counted.


	2. Chapter 2

            After the war, I travelled around the earth and the colonies.  I went from place to place, staying for a week or two before moving on.  I wanted to see the world that I had given up everything to save.

            When I stopped at L2, I found Duo and Hilde and their scrapyard.  I worked in the yard with Duo in exchange for room and board.  I slept on a creaky couch, the food was questionable, and Duo and I fought constantly.  Yet for some reason, I stayed there longer than I stayed anywhere else.

            After a month of being there, I finally left.  We were looking under the hood of a car that Duo insisted could be fixed, and which I told him wasn’t worth the trouble.  Duo was ranting about how I’d gotten soft in my old age, and when he turned to glare at me we just kissed.

            I was gone the next day.

            I continued travelling, but it didn’t feel the same.  It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to see the world anymore.  It was hard for me to understand what I was feeling.

            Quatre contacted us about sending our gundams into the sun, and I decided to head back to L2.

            Duo and I both agreed to destroy our gundams, and I left.

            Duo acted the same as always.  As we parted ways at the spaceport, I felt strange.  I felt wrong.  I watched him go, and I wondered if I should go with him.

            I headed to L1 instead.

            Something was in the air.  The Barton uprising started, and Duo and I found ourselves working as partners again.  It was comfortable.  I insulted him, Duo got angry, and then we covered each other’s backs.

            Then the mission took over, I put Duo out of mind, and did everything I could to save Relena and stop Operation Meteor.

            After it was all over, I felt completely drained.

            Was I just passing time until the next war?

            I went to America and I stared at the Grand Canyon.

            I went to Egypt and I stared at the pyramids.

            I went to Australia and I stared at the Great Barrier Reef.

            I went to Nepal and I climbed Mount Everest.

            Then I went to back to L2.

            “Where ya been?” Duo asked, grinning at me as I sat down at the kitchen table.

            “Here and there.”

            “You missed me so much you had to come running back to shitty L2?”

            “Yes.”

            Duo’s smile faltered.

            “I missed you,” I said firmly.

            “I didn’t know that robot boys had feelings,” Duo said, trying to smile at his own stupid joke and failing.

            “I just know that when you’re not with me, it’s wrong.”

            “Jesus, Heero, did you injure your head or something?”

            “You don’t feel the same way?”

            “I…” Duo tried to speak and ended up just gawping at me.

            I pressed my knee to his and I felt better.  This was where I was supposed to be.

            Duo looked at me like I was crazy, but there was a faint smile trying to come out.

            “Well?” I said.

            Duo pushed his chair back, standing up and coming over beside me.

            I looked up at him.

            “You’re a weirdo,” he informed me.

            I waited.

            “I missed you, too,” he finally said, wrapping his arms around me in a hug.

            I stayed on L2 until the raid on the scrapyard that sent me, Duo, and Hilde all to prison.

            “Count!”

            Duo and I left our cell and stood out front.

            Reynolds glared at me.  Duo stuck his tongue out at him.

            D’Antuono came over and read our numbers, then we were free to head off to the showers.  After a month of it, I already had the routine down.  Every day was basically the same, with a few small changes on certain days that were the only markers of the passage of time.

            Duo stripped and wrapped his towel around his waist.  I followed suit.  We plodded down the hall in our flip flops, joining the line of prisoners waiting to go to the showers.  Duo liked to socialize in the line, while I just stuck by his side, shoulder pressed to his while I studied our surroundings.

            When I felt Duo tense, I tuned into his conversation.

            “I don’t like games,” Duo said, his tone affable and a smile stretched across his face.

            “No games here,” the other inmate said, smiling back calmly.

            “Then make your order and move on.”

            “I’m just saying that there’s other ways to get things, and maybe you should offer me a better deal.”

            “Then you can go fuck yourself,” Duo said, still smiling with the eyes of a killer.

            I slid my hand up his bare shoulder, gripping lightly.

            Duo reached up to press his hand over mine, but he didn’t take his eyes off of the other inmate.

            The guy shifted nervously under Duo’s gaze before finally taking off.

            “Don’t get involved,” he said, taking my hand from his shoulder and pressing it to his lips.

            “Ooo,” someone catcalled at us with a snicker.

            Duo ignored it.

            “Maxwell, Yuy, cut it out already,” D’Antuono said, gesturing at us to move apart.

            Duo smiled at the guard, planting a kiss on my mouth before pulling away.

            D’Antuono made a disgusted face and continued moving down the line.

            “Dunno what his problem is,” Duo said breezily.

            “Shouldn’t you be keeping your head down?”

            “That’s just you.”

            “Hn.”

            After washing up, it was time for breakfast.

            Duo and I always sat at an empty table.  Other prisoners always came to sit with us.  They were always from the colonies.  Quatre, Rashid, and Trowa were always surrounded by a sea of covered heads.  Wufei always sat alone.

            Howard joined us that morning, looking strange in his prison-issued navy blue clothes.

            Duo’s smile always got a little brighter for Howard.

            “The food’s extra shit today, huh?” Howard said, cheerfully shoveling the brown liquid into his mouth.

            “I don’t think those earth bounders know what oatmeal actually is,” Finelli, the short guy from L2, muttered.

            I thought the consistency of it was pretty similar to the military rations I’d ingested on the colonies.

            “So I’ve got this odd clunker in the motor pool,” Howard said, and Duo’s ears perked up.  Howard worked in mechanical.  When the prison realized that they had a bona fide engineering genius under lock and key, they took him off of fixing broken lights and gave him his own department.  He was doing the work of professionals for the pennies they paid prisoners.

            I listened to Duo and Howard talk out the mysterious sound coming from the car’s engine.  I liked watching Duo talk shop.  He got more serious, but he still smiled a lot, the smile reaching all the way up to his eyes.  I appreciated how intelligent he sounded, unlike the usual verbal diarrhea that came spewing out when he was talking to his L2 associates.

            It was a weekday, so after breakfast it was time for work.  Duo had gotten me into the dress factory as promised.

            I didn’t care for it.

            The job itself was all right.  I stood on the assembly line all day making sure that all the dresses came out looking like dresses.  It was monotonous, mind-numbing, and something I was perfectly suited for.

            Then there was Duo.  He was the foreman of the factory, which involved carrying around a clipboard and telling everyone else what to do while he dealt with his smuggling empire.

            “Looks like Maxwell’s getting us a huge pay day,” commented Zeke, my partner in dress examining.  He was a bit lax in his work ethic, partly due to his failing eyesight and partly due to his endless need to talk to me.

            “Hn,” I muttered, continuing to watch the never-ending line of dresses.

            “I was thinking of getting myself some new boots at commissary, on accounta these got holes in the soles,” Zeke said, lifting his leg up and over the conveyor belt so his boot fell into my line of vision.  He knew I wouldn’t have looked at it otherwise.  “Just gotta sell four more packs of cigarettes and I’m good.”

            I pulled a dress off of the line with a crooked hemline.

            “I guess you don’t gotta sweat the selling so much since you’re with the boss man,” Zeke mused, putting his boot back on the concrete floor.

            “You mean ’cause he’s Maxwell’s bitch?” Tony the Reject Dress Collector interjected with a snort, picking up the box of mistakes and carting it off to a different part of the factory.

            I continued to watch the dresses.

            “Moron,” Zeke muttered under his breath with a snort.  “These young kids don’t know what’s what.”

            Tony was in his late 30s, but since Zeke was pushing 70, I guess the term ‘kid’ was relative.

            “This one look all right to you?” Zeke asked, taking a dress off of the line and holding it out to me.

            “Yes,” I said, taking it from him and putting it back on the belt.  “You need glasses.”

            “I see just fine.”

            “Hn.”

            After work, Duo and I went back to our cell.  I usually read while Duo babbled on about whatever, or did some exercise.  When he actually wanted me to listen to him, he’d reach over and grab my book, blue eyes sparkling as he tossed it over his shoulder.

            If we had been at home on L2, this would have led to yelling, wrestling, and maybe a little groping.  In prison, any kind of raised voices or scuffling brought over a guard to break it up.

            I usually settled for a glare, hoping to discipline Duo with my eyes, while he just continued to smile his impish smile and tell me whatever inane thing it was that he so desperately needed me to listen to.

            Today he needed to tell me about Finelli’s diarrhea.  “No one could use the office bathroom for the rest of the shift, it was like entering a war zone,” Duo said solemnly.

            “Pick up my damn book,” I said, glaring at him.

            “Make me,” Duo said cheerfully.

            I considered it.  Duo and I had already been caught fighting twice, but Duo had somehow managed to talk the guards out of sending us to solitary.  After Duo had convinced Hernandez that we had just been practicing wrestling moves, and that I had not in fact been choking the life out of him, I was fairly certain that Duo could bullshit his way out of anything.  Because I really had been choking the life out of him.

            Not that it was something to worry about.  I would have let go after he passed out.

            Duo and I had a complicated relationship.

            “Pick it up,” I said flatly, deciding not to push my luck.

            Duo looked disappointed, but bent over and picked the book up.  He dangled it in front of me before quickly retracting his arm when I reached out to take it.

            He really was the most annoying person in the ESUN sometimes.

            I sat up, grabbing the collar of his wifebeater and yanking him close.

            Duo’s eyes widened a little, but he looked pleased as I pressed my mouth roughly to his.

            It wasn’t a very nice kiss, all clanging teeth and messy tongues, but when I pulled away Duo was smiling softly as he handed me back my book.

            “Wasn’t that better than reading?” he asked, watching as I lay back down.

            “The diarrhea story?  No.”

            Duo was giving me those _eyes_.

            I glanced towards the hallway, but didn’t see anyone.  Count was soon.  “Come here,” I said.

            Duo grinned, laying down next to me and resting his cheek on my chest.

            I flipped my book back open and started to read again.

            Duo closed his eyes and we had a rare quiet moment in ESUN Max, the only sound our soft breathing and the flipping of pages.

            Then the buzzer rang out and Taylor was shouting, “Count!”

            “Fucking count,” Duo muttered, not moving.

            I dropped my book next to my pillow, staring up at the top bunk.

            We lay there for just another moment before both shooting out from the bed and lining up for count.

            “What were you two doing?” Reynolds asked snidely.

            Duo made a fist and jammed his pointer finger into the curve of his thumb repeatedly, grinning all the while.

            I rolled my eyes.

            It was generally accepted by the prison population that I was Duo’s bitch, and that he fucked me in the ass about twenty times a day.  Reality was a bit different as we’d never even had sex before, but I didn’t particularly care what people thought, so I didn’t correct them.

            Duo, on the other hand, encouraged it to the best of his ability.  He said it was to keep me out of trouble, but really I think he just liked that everyone thought he was my bitch master.

            Taylor came by and counted us, then returned to the guard station.  The buzzer sounded, and it was time for dinner.

            Much like all meals in ESUN Max, dinner was crap.  I usually sat with Duo, but if I wanted some peace and quiet, I went over to sit with Wufei.

            That night I didn’t feel up to separating from Duo.  I stuck close to him, our fingers brushing as we walked.

            Sometimes I just had to be touching Duo to feel whole.

            Simpers, the sumo wrestler, joined us as soon as we’d put our trays down on the table.  “There’s something going down with the earth bounders.”

            Duo and Simpers both cast a wary eye towards the kitchen staff, who were currently putting out scoop after scoop of food on the inmates’ trays.  Earth bounders ran the kitchen, while the ladies’ dress factory was run by colonists.  The kitchen and the dress factory were the two main sources of contraband in the prison, so the kitchen staff was Duo’s competitor in the black market.

            I started eating, not particularly interested in the latest drama.  I rested my left hand on Duo’s knee, feeling relaxed despite the tension thrumming through my significant other.

            Simpers and Duo whispered heatedly about how to counterattack the nefarious earth bounders.  I ate my food.

            After dinner, we headed to the gym before lockup.  Sometimes I skipped out on the gym and went to the library instead.  No matter the variation, though, the monotony of the routine still wore at me.

            Duo was busy holding court with his L2 lackeys while he lifted weights.  I worked out by myself.  We headed back after an hour, Duo moving towards the TV and me towards Quatre’s cell.

            “Trowa.”

            “Heero.”

            Trowa let me past him into Quatre’s cell, then resumed his looming bodyguard position.

            “Hello, Heero,” Quatre said, smiling at me warmly as he rose from his chair to give me a hug.

            I patted an awkward hand on his shoulder before drawing back.

            “Would you care for some refreshments?” Quatre offered, like we were meeting in one of his luxurious mansions instead of his prison cell.

            “I’m all right,” I said.

            “He’s watching,” Trowa interjected.

            “I know,” I said.  Reynolds was always watching me.

            Rashid rose up from his bunk bed, going to the door of the cell and glowering at Reynolds.

            Reynolds just smirked and moved on.

            “Did you see the news from the Sanc Kingdom?” Quatre asked, holding a newspaper out for my inspection.  Quatre wasn’t one to get dragged into prison drama.  Rashid and Trowa made sure of that.

            “No,” I said, taking the paper from him.  Relena had opened up a school for war orphans in Sanc.  I couldn’t help but smile fondly at her queenly visage staring up at me from the newsprint.

            “You can have that if you’d like,” Quatre said.

            I nodded, tucking the paper away to read later.

            I stayed with Quatre until count, listening to him chatter about his sisters and his company.

            Duo was twitchy, waiting outside of our cell.  He and Reynolds seemed to be having a stare down.

            “Hi,” I said, casting an eye down the line to make sure the guard was busy counting before pressing a kiss to Duo’s cheek.  I could feel the upturn of his mouth under my lips.

            I joined him in line, pretending not to notice Reynolds’s disgust.

            “Faggots,” he muttered.

            “Jealous?” Duo asked cheerfully.

            Reynolds snorted, like what Duo was suggesting was preposterous.

            “L287Q9,” prison guard Huang said, eyeing Duo.  “L1243G,” he said, looking at me.

            With count over, we went into our cells, the doors locking behind us.  Duo changed while I brushed my teeth and washed my face.  Then we switched, Duo taking up in front of the sink while I changed.

            Reynolds was watching from across the way.

            I’d been thinking for some time that I’d like to sneak out of my cell and give him a friendly little nighttime visit.  One with knives and threats and possible bloodshed.

            And that was why I was in prison in the first place.

            I tried to get rid of the image from my head, but there was something so satisfying about the terror I imagined in his eyes while I pressed the blade to his throat.

            It’s not like I had a knife anyway.  Though Duo knew how to make a shank from the coils in our mattresses.

            “What’s wrong, Heero?” Duo asked, poking me between the eyes, where undoubtedly a wrinkle had formed.

            “Thinking about doing bad things.”

            “Are you going to do them to me?” Duo asked, giving me a flirty smile.

            “You want me to cut your throat?” I asked.

            “Ew, no,” Duo said.  Then he paused.  “Well, how deep are we talking?”

            “You disturb me.”

            “You’re the one who brought it up!”

            I leaned in close, lips to his ears so as not to be overheard.  “I was thinking about Reynolds.”

            “Look, I know you get off on fighting with people, but I thought we had a monogamous thing going here,” Duo said with a frown.

            “Duo.”

            “You’re the one having kinky thoughts about our arch nemesis.”

            “Stop being ridiculous.”

            Duo poked me between the eyes again.  “Let’s talk after lights out.”

            I nodded, retreating to my bunk to read.

            Duo went to the desk and started writing, probably a letter to Hilde or Sally at ESUN Max Women’s.

            Lights out always came suddenly, a loud buzz the only warning before being plunged into darkness.

            Duo hopped up onto his bunk, and we both waited.  Huang passed by after ten minutes.  When the light of his flashlight had disappeared back towards the guard station, Duo hopped down from his bed and slid into mine with me.

            “Hi,” he said, sneaking a cold hand under my shirt and resting it on my stomach.

            “Hi yourself,” I said, pulling him closer so we could kiss.

            Duo’s lips were always warm and inviting, despite his freezing hands.

            “I’ve wanted to do this all day,” Duo mumbled into my mouth.

            “Then shut up and do it.”

            “Bitch,” Duo muttered, but he shut up anyway because he needed it as badly as I did.

            It was a relief, touching Duo with no one watching.  I traced along his clavicle, pushing his shirt aside so I could kiss his bare shoulder.

            Duo knotted his fingers into my hair, yanking it upwards.

            I growled at him.

            Duo ignored the threat as he was wont to do, kissing me instead with his fingers still wound tightly in my hair.

            When it got hard to breathe, we separated for a quick gasp of air before diving back in.

            Duo slid a leg between mine, pressing closer.

            And this is what we did at night.  We made out and we argued and we talked in hushed whispers, like two teenagers sneaking around.  Which is what we were.

            I liked the normalcy of it.

            That’s what I’d wanted after the war.  Just to be with Duo and live out our lives as normally as possible.  Then President Manfredo came to power and started rooting out all the terrorists and the guerillas from the war, trying to ‘clean up’ the earth sphere.  His first step was to arrest all of the gundam pilots and their collaborators in a one day sweep that not only saw us all in chains, but also brought down the Preventers.  With Une arrested along with Wufei and Sally, and with Zechs and Noin still at large, the command structure fell apart.

            But that wasn’t my problem anymore.

            I was here in ESUN Max, doing my time for all the crimes I’d committed in the first 16 years of my life.  The outside world didn’t matter anymore, because I’d never see it again.

            That’s what I told myself.

            I focused on the here and now, kissing Duo with everything I had left.

            Duo looked a little hazy when he pulled back, a slow, lazy smile on his lips.  “You’re good at that.”

            “Thanks,” I answered with a shrug.

            “Mm,” Duo said, giving me a last peck before getting serious.  “So what was up earlier?  With Reynolds?”

            “It’s nothing,” I said.

            Duo tugged on my ear sharply.

            “Knock it off,” I said with a scowl, pushing his hand away.

            “Tell me.”

            “You already know.  He’s stalking me.”

            “Maybe he has a crush on you.”

            “That doesn’t seem likely.”

            “Maybe he has a crush on me?”

            “That seems more likely.”

            Duo snorted.

            “I want to take him out.”

            Duo blinked slowly.

            “I’m not going to,” I amended.  “But I want to.”

            “And that freaks you out,” Duo said, running his fingers through my hair and looking unfazed.

            “Yeah, maybe,” I said, staring into Duo’s unwavering eyes.

            “You’re not a bad person, Heero,” he said.  “Everyone in this damn prison thinks about killing Reynolds at some point or another.”

            “Like you?”

            “Fuck yes, that asswipe,” Duo muttered.  “Thinks he can undercut my prices and steal my customers…”

            “Why is he here?” I asked.  “In ESUN Max?”

            “Dunno,” Duo said, poking me in the cheek.  His finger lingered there before tracing over my lips.  “Howard heard he was roughing up fed prisoners a little more than necessary, maybe even sticking his dick in ’em.”

            “So torture and rape?”

            “That’s the rumor.”

            “Has he tried anything in here?”

            Duo shrugged.  “Who hasn’t?”  He continued tracing my lips.

            I bit the offending digit to get him to stop.

            “Ow,” Duo said, not looking the least bit hurt.

            “Focus.”

            “Focus yourself.  We’ve only got ten minutes left.”

            “I’m trying to have a conversation with you.”

            “Which is pretty weird,” Duo commented, “coming from Mr. Short, Dark, and Silent.”

            “I conversate on occasion.”

            “ _I_ conversate and you listen.”

            “You conversate and I ignore you.”

            “That’s like the perfect summary of our relationship.”

            Duo was smiling, but he looked tired.

            I kissed the tip of his nose.

            I got pounced on for my efforts at affection.

            “No time,” Duo said mournfully, pinning my wrists to the mattress.

            “We’ve got nothing but time.”

            “A lifetime of time, huh?”

            Huang was coming, and Duo scurried back up to the top bunk.


	3. Chapter 3

            I wanted out of the ladies’ dress factory.

            It wasn’t that I minded the work.  And the company was fine, too, even if Zeke was half-blind and therefore completely incompetent at his job.

            Duo knew why.  Duo lied to my face because he knew I wouldn’t approve, but if he thought he could hide something like that from me, then he was every bit the idiot I often accused him of being.

            It started in the middle of the night.  Everyone had been sleeping, but I was a light sleeper and I knew as soon as something was wrong.  Brown had been doing the midnight count, but had stopped in the middle, calling Huang over.  I got up and went to stand at the door of my cell, trying to catch what was going on.

            As they took Masters out of his cell on a gurney, it was obvious that he was already dead.

            Duo came up behind me, resting his chin on my shoulder.  “What’s happening?” he murmured.

            “Masters overdosed.”

            “Masters did?”

            “Yeah.”

            Duo was silent.

            Masters had been a guerilla from L3, arrested in the same sweep that took us in.  He worked in the mailroom, but he’d been one of Duo’s loyal customers.

            “Think he’s gonna be okay?” Duo finally ventured, sliding his arms around my waist.  The guards were too busy to tell us to break it up.

            I stayed standing stiffly, staring out into the cellblock.  “No.”

            Duo tensed, turning his face up to study mine.  “What’s wrong?”

            I shrugged out of his hold, going back to my bed.  “A man is dead, that’s what’s wrong.”

            Duo stayed at the door, watching to see if anything else happened.

            I went to sleep.

            During morning count, the guards moved in to toss all of our cells.  Anyone who was smart had flushed anything incriminating the night before.  They didn’t find much beyond a pair of sewing scissors and some pornographic magazines.

            There was a flurry of activity in the ladies’ dress factory that morning.  Zeke and I just worked the machines, having nothing to do with it.

            “Yuy, what’s wrong?” Zeke asked as we worked.

            “Do I look like something’s wrong?” I asked, continuing to watch the dresses come off the line.

            “You look about twice as murderous as usual,” Zeke commented, coming over to my side of the conveyor belt.

            I snorted at that.  Most people couldn’t read my change in moods at all, but apparently blind-as-a-bat Zeke could.

            “Is it Masters?” he asked carefully.

            I didn’t answer.

            “I don’t mess with the drug shit either,” Zeke said.  “But it’s a part of prison life.  I been here forty years now, and that ain’t never changed.  Some of us just need an escape.”

            I held my jaw tense, still not saying anything.

           “Maxwell’s a good guy, ya know?” Zeke pressed on.  “Since he took over the factory, things have been good.  He’s not greedy, ya know?  And he looks out for us, all of us, even an old fart like me.”

            “He told me he wasn’t selling drugs,” I finally ground out.

            Zeke looked at me, surprised that I was actually participating in his one man conversation.  “Well, shit.”

            “I knew he was lying,” I continued, clenching my fists.  “But I didn’t see him doing it, and it didn’t seem like it was hurting anybody.  So I turned a blind eye to it.”

            “You blame yourself, don’t you?” Zeke said, looking surprised.

            “Let’s get back to work.”

            Zeke shook his head and went back to his side of the conveyor belt.

            I ate all of my meals alone that day, surrounded by other outcasts.

            “Heero, quit being mad,” Duo complained as the door slammed shut to our cell.  “I didn’t do anything.”

            I didn’t answer, turning the page of my book loudly.

            “Babe.”

            “Fuck off, Duo.”

            “Oooo,” a voice hooted from down the block.

            “Lover’s tiff.”

            There was a lot of snickering and catcalling.

            “Fuck all of you,” Duo called out good-naturedly to the other inmates.

            I ignored them and continued to read my book.

            After lights out, I heard the familiar squeak of Duo easing off of his bed.

            “Don’t.”

            Duo paused, feet dangling down from his bunk.  “Heero, let’s talk.”

            “Tomorrow.”

            Duo sighed.  “You’re a real drama queen sometimes, you know that?”

            I didn’t answer, and Duo settled back into his bunk.

            “There’s an opening in the library,” Wufei told me the next day at breakfast.

            I looked up from my cereal.

            “If you’re interested, I could probably get you transferred in by next week.”

            “I’m interested.”

            Wufei nodded and we went back to eating.

            The transfer went through easily, and Duo wasn’t pleased.

            “You should be staying close to me,” he growled at me as we lay in my bed after lights out.

            “I’m a big boy, Duo,” I said.  “I can take care of myself.”

            “You’re being dumb.”

            I didn’t answer.

            “Stop being so cold to me,” he complained, pawing at me.  He reminded me of an angry kitten.

            I stared at him.

            “You’re mad about the drugs?  Do you want me to stop bringing them into the dress factory?”

            I didn’t say anything, and Duo finally got tired of staring me down.

            “You’re an asshole,” he said, giving me a shove and climbing on top of me.

            I let him because I missed him and I needed him, and it felt so much better to circle my arms around him and pull him closer.  “I don’t like you,” I told him.

            “I know,” Duo said with a carefree smile.

            “I love you.”

            “I know,” Duo said, his expression softening.  “I love you, too.  Even if you’re a dick.”

            We kissed, and I felt like my insides were twisting, which was completely illogical, but nothing involving Duo was logical.  Duo was bursts of passion and flashes of anger and loud words and tight hugs and fierce whispers and smirky smiles and hissed threats and fiery explosions, and I needed all of that to keep me balanced.

            Back on L2, I’d found a peace I’d never known before, living each day with Duo.  The year I spent sequestered due to my trial had been difficult.  I spent my days in court listening to every questionable thing I’d ever done in my life get paraded out before the jury, questioned and dissected until it all became meaningless.  I went to bed every night feeling heavy, like something was crushing my chest.

            Relena said that it was guilt.

            She said that I had nothing to feel guilty about.  I don’t know how she could say that with the same mouth used to preach about peace and nonviolence.

            She didn’t understand.

            Duo understood.

            “We killed people,” Duo had whispered to me on L2.  “We killed them, and we took them away from their families, and that’s shit, Heero, it’s complete shit.  Someone probably killed our parents, too, you know.  And maybe it was someone fighting for a cause, fighting for equality and freedom and peace and all that other shit, but was it worth it?  Does the end justify the means?  That’s what we have to decide for ourselves, Heero, did the end justify the means?”

            “Do you think it did?” I asked him.

            “It doesn’t matter what I think,” he said.  “It’s up to you to decide.”

            Lying in our cell now, Duo’s head tucked under my chin for a last few minutes before the next count, I stroked his hair.  “The end always justifies the means for you, doesn’t it?”

            “Are you trying to get philosophical on me or some shit?” Duo murmured, casting sleepy eyes up at me.

            I shook my head.  “Just remembering something.”

            “Less remembering, more hair stroking.”

            I snorted and did as he said, because I wanted to and it felt good.

            I was able to start working at the library within a week, just as Wufei had said.  We re-shelved the books, made notes on damage, and helped anyone who was looking for something.  It was a simple enough job with a lot of down time.

            “You like your new job?” Duo asked at dinner.

            “Yeah,” I said.

            “Okay,” he said, and he let it be.

            I worked at the library, and Duo worked at the dress factory.

            I found myself spending more time with Wufei.  He’d been at ESUN Max the longest of the five gundam pilots, so I valued his perspective.

            “I had to prove myself right away,” he told me as we shelved books side-by-side.  “I was the youngest person in the prison, and I was the first gundam pilot.  I had enemies before I even set foot inside my cell.”

            “No one bothers you now.”

            “I set things straight,” Wufei said.  There was tension in his eyes.  It was something that he wasn’t proud of.  “I just wanted to serve my time quietly.”

            I watched him as he put the last book in place and took hold of the cart, wheeling it back to the front desk.

            “Duo came next,” he told me another day as we sat, cataloguing new books that had been donated to the prison.  “Him and that damn braid of his and those big blue eyes.  He didn’t stand a chance.”

            I paused in my work.

            “He was harassed from day one,” Wufei continued.  “He was attacked by day two, and he was in solitary by day three.  I didn’t see him again for two months.”

            “That’s a long time to be in the hole,” I commented.  Most of the guys in our block were back in less than a week.

            “Ten men attacked him,” Wufei said.  “Half of them are disabled now, and the other half are in the psych ward.”

            I wasn’t surprised.  When Duo did something, he did it all the way.

            “What did they want from him?”

            “Revenge?  To break something younger and more beautiful than them?  It doesn’t really matter.  Here, everything’s about the amount of power you have over everyone else.”

            I thought that over while we worked.

            “Trowa was next, right?” I finally asked.

            “Yes,” Wufei said.  “He lasted a week before joining Duo in solitary.”

            “And Quatre?”

            “By the time Quatre got here, we knew how things worked,” Wufei said.  “Trowa put Quatre under his protection, and the Maguanacs backed him up.”

            “And then he became the religious leader of all the Muslims in ESUN Max…”

            Wufei shrugged.  It was an odd gesture from him.

            “And now I’m under Duo’s protection.”

            “Yes.”

            “But what happens if Duo’s not around?”

            “You hope his name is powerful enough to deter any interest from yourself.”

            I thought about it.  “Reynolds is after me.”

            “Reynolds is the scum of the earth,” Wufei said with look of disgust.

            I couldn’t argue with that.

            The next week, Wufei and I were returning from the library to the cellblock with Jameson, a lazy prison guard who was always forgetting things.

            That day he realized that he’d forgotten to fill something out in the library logbook.

            “I’ll be right back,” he said, leaving Wufei and I in the nebulous corridor that led to various locations throughout the prison.

            Wufei and I exchanged a look.  Words weren’t needed to express our exasperation.

            We waited for longer than I thought was necessary.  It was almost time for count.

            “Yuy!”

            Wufei was already crouched in a defensive position and I was going for a gun that had long since been taken away.

            “Marshall Noventa sends his regards,” Reynolds said, suddenly appearing in front of us.  He had two lackeys with him, each brandishing a sawed down toothbrush.

            I broke the arm of the man coming at me, taking him and myself both by surprise.

            “I didn’t mean to do that,” I said, my voice sounding detached as I spoke.

            The man just screamed.

            The hall suddenly became silent.  Reynolds was gone, and the other man with a shank was lying unconscious on the ground.

            The man with the broken arm let out a long whimper, breaking up the quiet.

            Wufei and I exchanged a look.

            “Well, fuck,” I said, leaning against the wall.

            Wufei nodded his agreement.

            Jameson seemed to think the same when he finally got back to us.  “What the fuck?”

            “They attacked us,” Wufei said simply.

            “Is that one dead?!”

            “No.”

            Jameson let out a long-suffering sigh and radioed in for backup.

            Wufei and I waited patiently.

            “Usually the guilty party flees the scene of the crime,” Jameson commented, watching as a group of four guards came rushing onto the scene with two medics.

            “I stand by what I do,” Wufei said.

            Wufei and I were both shoved to the ground and roughly chained, despite the fact that we didn’t offer any resistance.  We were taken to Tamura’s office, who was the man in charge of Cellblock D.

            “I can’t have this kind of violence in my cellblock.”

            Wufei and I both found ourselves in solitary for the next week.

            A week was a long time to be alone with one’s thoughts.

            I was surprised I hadn’t killed the man who came at me.  My instinct for violence was so deeply honed inside of me that it was automatic, without a conscious thought.  I’d broken the man’s arm, but I hadn’t killed him.

            Maybe there was something that was still salvageable inside of me.

            Or maybe I’d stopped because Wufei was there.  Because the guard was coming.  Because I knew we were already caught.

            Had my mind calculated all the risks?

            I was a killer.  My mind had lost the taste for it, but my body still acted on instinct.  I’d tried to play house with Duo, tried to act like I was normal, but what I was could not go unpunished.

            That’s what I thought about in solitary.  Endlessly.  For one week.

            “Yuy!”

            My eyes met Maynard’s through the window in the door.  Maynard was one of the few female guards, but she acted like she had a dick; Duo’s description, not mine.

            After a week of being under her care, though, I couldn’t say that I disagreed.

            “You’re outta here,” she said, unlocking the door.

            “Oh,” I said.

            Maynard led me back to Cellblock D, giving me a lot of unnecessary shoves along the way.

            “Hey, Yuy, you’re back,” Taylor greeted me at the guard station, hitting the switch to open the door and let me in.  “Did Maynard take real good care of you?”

            I stared at him.

            “As talkative as always.  Thanks, Maynard, we’ll take it from here.”

            “See you soon, Yuy,” Maynard said, waggling her fingers at me as she headed back to solitary.

            I hoped she wasn’t right, but had the vague feeling that she probably was.

            “Your little boyfriend’s at the gym if you want to go see him,” Taylor said, rolling his eyes at me.

            “No,” I said, walking down the cellblock to my cell.  It was after dinner but still about an hour before count and lockdown, so most of the cells were empty.

            I lay on my bed, staring up at Duo’s bunk above me.  Despite spending most of my time in solitary in self-flagellation, I had thought about Duo a little, too.

            Sometimes I thought of Duo as my salvation.  When I was with him, I just felt right.  Like everything else didn’t matter.

            It wasn’t normal.  I thought it was normal, but really it was obsessive and codependent.  I needed to distance myself from Duo.  This thing between us wasn’t right, and it was going to hurt us both in the end.

            “Heero?”

            My name had barely left his lips before I had him pinned to the wall, kissing him senseless.

            A clanging against the bars of our cell sent us skittering apart.

            “Maxwell, Yuy, enough,” Huang said, looking at us evenly.  Huang was a stickler for rules, but I got the feeling that he didn’t mind our relationship the way some of the other guards did.

            “Aw, come on, Huangsy,” Duo protested, giving the guard a charming smile.

            “Maxwell.”

            “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Duo said, hopping up onto his bunk.  He held up his hands as if to say, ‘see, no touching.’

            I leaned against the wall across from him, watching Duo’s swinging legs.

            “Just follow the rules,” Huang said, giving us both a last look before moving back down the cellblock.

            “Fuck, I missed you, baby,” Duo breathed out.

            “Me, too,” I said quietly.

            “You okay?”

            I nodded.

            “Maynard get handsy with you?” he asked, eyes suddenly narrowing.

            “Handsy?” I repeated.

            “Handsy,” he affirmed, making a grabbing motion with his hand.

            “No…”

            “Good.”

            “COUNT!”

            Duo slid down from his bunk and we went to stand in front of our cell.

            Reynolds was there, smirking at me.  “Did you have a nice time in solitary?” he asked snidely.

            “Yeah, ’cause he didn’t have to see your ugly face every day,” Duo put in.

            “What he said,” I agreed, nodding at Duo.

            Reynolds’ roommate, an earth bounder named Lee, let out a loud snort.

            “Shut up, Lee!” Reynolds barked, and the other man snapped to attention, though there was still a hint of a smile on his lips.

            Duo grinned, elbowing me in the side.  “Looks like he’s losing control of his men.”

            “Looks like,” I agreed.

            Duo was smiling, but the look in his eyes was deadly.

            After lights out, Duo whispered into my ear all his fantasies about killing Reynolds.

            “You seriously have problems,” I finally told him when he got to fantasy number 10, which involved sneaking smashed up glass into Reynold’s food until he finally succumbed to internal injuries.

            “He fucked with you, he fucked with my business, and now I’m gonna fuck him.”

            “Duo,” I reasoned with him, nuzzling his neck.

            “Don’t be adorable, it’s distracting,” Duo complained, petting my head.

            “Adorable?” I repeated with a snort.

            “Mm, my cutie pie Heero,” he murmured, sounding drowsy.

            “Huang will be coming soon.”

            “Just a few more… min…” Duo trailed off.

            “Duo didn’t sleep much while you were gone,” Quatre informed me the next day as we sat in his cell, eating English biscuits and sipping black tea from plastic cups.

            I studied his blue eyes, looking for more information.

            “He’s very attached to you,” he said.  There was a note of disapproval in his voice.  “But I think that you’re good for him,” he added softly.

            I’d never discussed my relationship with Duo with anyone.  There was no need to.  It was just something that was.  But I could see in Quatre’s eyes that he was dying to express his opinion on the matter.

            “Just speak clearly,” I told him.

            Quatre flushed, then straightened up.  “The Quran speaks against that… kind of relationship.”

            “I’m aware.”

            “I just… my religion and my God are important to me.  They’ve given me peace, a path to forgiveness.  So I can’t say that I agree with your relationship.  But I think that being with you makes Duo a better person.”

            I tried to let that sink in, but it didn’t really make sense to me.

            “You’re not like the rest of us,” Wufei said the next day after I told him about my conversation with Quatre.  “You and Trowa.  You’re both… well, perhaps ‘pure’ isn’t the right word, but something along those lines.”

            I stared at him.

            “Do not look at me like I’m crazy,” Wufei said, moving the cart of books forward so we could continue shelving them.  “I assure you that I am not.”

            “If anyone of the five us is pure, I’d say it’s Quatre… or Duo… or you…”

            Wufei snorted, passing me two books to put on the top shelf.  “Quatre has the bloodiest hands of all of us, Maxwell is a thug, and I am a traitor.”

            “Trowa was the one always wearing the enemy’s uniform…”

            “Yes, he wore it for infiltration, but he didn’t wear it in his heart.”

            I stared at him.

            “What?”

            “That was really cheesy.”

            “You’re spending too much time with Duo.”

            “So you wore Mariemaia’s uniform in your heart?”

            “Yes, I… are you making fun of me?”

            I shrugged, moving forward through the stacks.

            “Too much time with Duo.”

            He was probably right.

            “Trowa, the others think that we’re pure,” I informed the taller boy as I put my dinner tray down next to his.

            “Pure what?” Trowa asked, green eyes squinting in consideration.  “Pure beefcake?”

            I hid a smile.  “Pure hearted.”

            Trowa raised an eyebrow, giving my words due consideration.

            I started to eat the slop of the day.

            “All three of them?” Trowa finally asked, chewing on his own food slowly.

            “Yes.  Duo in fact went so far as to say that we were sweet, innocent boys with tender hearts.”

            “Tender?” Trowa repeated.

            “Tender.”

            “And Duo?  Quatre?  Wufei?  What are they?”

            “Black hearted killers.”

            “Interesting,” Trowa said, turning his full attention to eating after casting a quick glance down the table at Quatre.

            I didn’t understand this perception of me.  I wasn’t a good person.

            “You saved the fucking world, Heero,” Duo murmured into my neck, catnapping in my bed before the late night count.

          “I had help,” I said.  “And I made so many mistakes before that.  Does one good deed really cancel out eve-”

            “Why can’t you just accept that you’re awesome?” Duo growled, groping his hand around blindly in the dark until he could smack me in the forehead.  “Everything you did up until now was amazing and changed the fucking course of history.”

            “That little girl and her puppy…”

            “Jesus fucking Christ, Heero, you made a mistake.  That doesn’t make you a bad person.”

            “Doesn’t it, thought?”

            “Am I a bad person?”

            I paused to think about it.  “Yes.”

            Duo snorted.  “Well, you’re nothing like me, so that must mean that you’re good.”

            “That seems like a stretch.”

            “Well if I’m a bad person, and you love me-”

            “Do I?”

            “Yes, very much so.  Anyway, like I was saying, I’m a horrible person, but you love me anyway.  So what’s wrong with being a bad person?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “There you go,” Duo said, seeming pleased with his triumph of logic.

            “You really are a horrible person, though,” I said.

            “You think so?”

            “You’re still selling drugs.  And I know you’re the one who kicked the shit out of Lynch.”

            “He was stealing from my contraband.”

            “And you’re trying to think of a way to kill Reynolds.”

            “As any sane person would.”

            “I don’t like the drugs.  All those chemicals the scientists pumped into me… it fucks you up.”

            “I’ll… see what I can do.”

            Duo was a terrible liar, but I always wanted to believe him.

            “Thank you, love,” I said, kissing his forehead.

            “Anything for you.”

            The light of the night guard’s flashlight reflected against the bars, sending Duo back up to his bunk and leaving me alone with my thoughts.


	4. Chapter 4

            The only person who ever visited me at the prison was Relena.

            She looked so strange under the harsh lights of the visitor’s room, sitting in a plastic folding chair with her hands folded primly in her lap.

            We were allowed one hug at the beginning of the visit and one on the way out.  Relena always seemed to gain inordinate amounts of strength at those times, squeezing me as tightly as she could.

            I just patted her awkwardly on the back.  I wasn’t really a hugger.

            “You look well,” she said, giving me a tight, sad smile as she sat down.

            I grunted in response.  Odin Lowe never taught me the art of small talk, and by the time I’d been passed off to Dr. J, it had been far too late for me to learn any manners.

            Relena’s smile brightened a little.  The strangest thing about her was that she liked me just the way I was.

            There was an awkward pause.

            “Have you heard the news?” Relena ventured.

            “What news?”

            “I’ve been elected the foreign minister in President Manfredo’s cabinet.”

            I studied her for a long time.  “Be careful,” I finally said.

            Relena smiled at me, her hand twitching to reach out and take mine.  “I’ll be all right.”

            “Manfredo doesn’t like you.”

            “And I don’t like him.”

            That got a smile out of me.

            “I’ll keep pushing for your pardon.”

            “You don’t have to do that.”

            “I don’t have to, but I want to.  You don’t belong here, Heero.”

            “I don’t know why people keep saying that to me.”

            Relena shook her head.  “You can’t see your own worth.”

            “Any word from Zechs?” I asked, changing the subject.

            Relena gave me a mysterious smile.

            I tilted my head, looking for more information.

            “I think he and Noin are somewhere safe and sound,” she said, sounding pleased.

            “That’s good,” I said.  Zechs and Noin didn’t need to join us in prison.

            Relena chatted for a while, and then it was time for another bone-breaking hug.  She smiled and waved until I disappeared through the door.

            “How was queeny?” Duo asked, glancing up from the common room TV as I came up beside him.

            “Good,” I said.

            “Good,” Duo said, tugging on my arm.

            I sat on the arm of his chair, checking that there were no guards watching before pressing my nose to his, lingering there for a moment before giving him a quick kiss.

            “Get a room,” someone groaned, but most of the other inmates were focused on the TV, watching a documentary about sharks.

            Duo rested a hand on my knee.

            I stayed and watched the rest of the documentary, despite my usual disinterest in television.  Sharks were strangely compelling creatures, and being next to Duo was comfortable.

            I was in a good mood as we headed to our cell for count, looping my fingers with Duo’s until Taylor yelled at us.

            Reynolds was looking pissier than usual.  “Fags,” he hissed at us.

            Duo grinned, giving him a finger wave.

            “What did you do?” I murmured into his ear.

            “Stole some of his customers,” Duo said cheerfully.  “And stuff.”

            I probably didn’t want to know what the stuff entailed.

            “Duo, would you quit your life of crime for me?” I asked him.

            Duo blinked at me for a long while.  “Do I have to?”

            “I was just asking.”

            “L287Q9,” Taylor said, looking at Duo before turning to me.  “L1243G.”  Then he strode away.

            We waited for the buzzer, then moved into our cell.  I found myself being backed onto my bed, sitting down when the back of my legs hit the mattress.

            Duo nudged my legs apart, standing between them and looking down at me.  “I drive you crazy,” he said thoughtfully, cupping my face in his hands.

            “Yes,” I agreed.  “You’re loud, insubordinate, moronic-”

            “Yeah, yeah, we all get it, Duo is a loser.”

            “I don’t think you’re a loser.”

            “Just loud, insubordinate, moronic, et cetera.”

            “Yes.”

            “Why are you still with me?” he asked, studying my face but avoiding my eyes.  “We were apart for a year.  You could have found someone else.”

            “Who, the court bailiff?” I asked, giving him a bemused look.

            “I dunno, was he hot?”

            “He was middle-aged and balding.”

            “Okay, but was he hot?”

            “I don’t think I understand your type.”

            “I’m into know-it-all assholes who think they’re superman.”

            “…Zechs?”

            “Shut up, Yuy.  You’re prettier when you don’t talk.”

            “I… okay…” I trailed off.

            “See?  Pretty,” Duo said, petting my head.

            “Duo.”

            Duo finally met my eyes.

            “There’s no one else for me in this world.”

            Duo smiled his real smile, then bit his lip.  “Shit, Heero, you’re a regular Casanova.”

            I knew that I was unnecessarily blunt and an asshole, but as long as I could make Duo smile like that, our relationship was all right.

            Duo leaned in to kiss me, only to stop short at Reynold’s voice yelling, “Hey, Taylor, I think there’s some hanky panky going on with the homos.”

            “Really, Reynolds, you got nothin’ better to do with your time?” Duo said, turning a glare on Reynolds who was leaning against the doorway of his own cell and watching us with a smirk.

            “Just trying to protect the sanctity of prison rules,” Reynolds said with a shrug.

            “Maxwell?  Are you in fact committing hanky panky?” Taylor asked, meandering towards our cell.

            “Yes, I have committed hanky panky in the first degree,” Duo said, leaning out the door and watching the guard’s progress.

            “I think that’s another ten years on your sentence,” Taylor commented, stopping in front of our cell.  He peered in at me, noting that I was sitting on my bed while Duo was standing at the door, which made hanky panky somewhat difficult to achieve.  “Watch yourselves,” he said, striding back towards the guard station.

            “We need to do something about Reynolds,” Duo muttered, glaring across the corridor.

            “Don’t worry about it,” I said.  “Let’s play chess.”

            Duo eyed me, then shrugged and sat on my bed with me, the chess set between us.  We played for a while, and he started to look less murderous.

            I thought that things were starting to settle down.

            The next afternoon at count, Reynolds didn’t so much as give us a nasty look.  The earth bounders serving us dinner did so in a perfectly friendly and genial manner, where as usually they exchanged snide comments with Duo and skimped on the dessert when putting food on our trays.

            “What did you do?” I asked Duo as we went to sit down.

            “Whaddya mean, Heero?”

            I stared at him.  I figured if I stared long enough, he would crack.

            Duo plunked his tray down and sat.  “Melcourt and I have come to an agreement,” he said, shoving his spoon into his slop and commencing eating.

            “When the hell did that happen?” I asked.  Melcourt was in charge of the kitchens and ran the earth bounders’ smuggling operation.  All the earth bounders answered to him, even Reynolds.  Prison had a chain of command just like any military.

            “We had a little tête-à-tête this morning,” Duo said with a shrug.

            I stared at him.

            “What?” Duo asked, blinking blue eyes up at me from where he was leaning over his tray, shoveling questionably drippy meatloaf into his mouth.

            A loud bark of laughter alerted us to the approach of a group of guys from the factory, all plopping their trays down around Duo and I.

            Duo was still looking at me.

            I shrugged and started eating my own food.  I needed my proper caloric intake for the day.

            Duo shrugged back and turned to his adoring subjects.  “Hey, so did you hear the one about the one-legged prostitute and the horse?”

            I tuned out and focused on eating.

            “Seems like there’s a truce,” Trowa mused quietly as we sat in Quatre’s cell, with Rashid standing outside the door, looking imposing.

            “Duo said that he and Melcourt came to an agreement,” I supplied

            “It won’t last,” Trowa said, accepting a glass of lemonade from Quatre.

            “You don’t need to be so negative,” Quatre scolded him.

            “Am I wrong?” Trowa asked.

            “No,” Quatre said, passing me a glass.

            I took a sip.

            “It’s foolish, really,” Quatre murmured, sitting down on the edge of his bed and sipping his own lemonade.  “Where a person was born, be it the earth or the colonies…  We were all born according to Allah’s will.”

            “Is Reynolds going to back off?” Trowa asked, eyeing me carefully.

            “It seems that way,” I said.

            Trowa stared into my eyes, then nodded.  He knew that I didn’t believe it for a second.  Reynolds would find a way to get at me.

            Or die trying.

            “Heero,” Quatre said softly, touching my arm.

            I turned to him.

            He hesitated.  “You… you could join us for study group tomorrow.”

            “I don’t believe in god.”

            “You don’t have to.  It’s just… I think it would be good for you.  Some spiritual reflection.  Some… distance from… negative influences…”

            I eyed him.  “From Duo?”

            “I didn’t say that,” Quatre said, flushing slightly.

            I studied his pink cheeks.  “You said that I’m good for Duo.”

            “You are,” Quatre said with a nod of agreement.  “When he’s with you… there’s a soft glow around him, a peace, a contentment.  When you’re apart, there’s only frenetic blackness.”

            “Okay…” I said, trying to accept Quatre at his word.  I didn’t see into people’s hearts the way that he did, and a lot of what he said often sounded like touchy feely nonsense to me.  “Then why do you think we need distance?”

            “You have that glow, too,” Quatre said, chewing on his bottom lip.  “When you two are together, I feel the warmth that you create.  It’s… it’s wonderful.  But sometimes...”

            “Sometimes what?” I asked after a long pause.

            “Sometimes I… I feel like that warmth is becoming something else,” Quatre said.  “Something dark.”

            I looked to Trowa, but he just shrugged.

            “Okay,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

            “Cookies?” Quatre offered, smiling cheerfully as he held out the sweets to us.

            I took a cookie and bit into it.

            Rashid shifted from his post, and Duo sidled into the cell.

            “Hello, Duo,” Quatre said.  “Cookie?”

            “Thanks, Q,” Duo said, snagging a cookie and munching it down in two bites.  “I see you all are having quite the tea party.”

            “It’s lemonade,” Trowa said.

            “Wild,” Duo commented, squeezing onto the bed between me and Quatre.  “Missed you,” he murmured into my ear, resting his chin on my shoulder.

            “I just saw you at dinner,” I said, wrapping an arm around him.  I’d missed him, too.

            Duo seemed to relax, leaning his weight into me.

            I could feel everyone’s eyes on us.

            “We should be going,” I said, touching Duo’s hand.  “Count.”

            “Mm, whatever,” Duo said, standing up with me.

            “Thanks for stopping by,” said Quatre, always the gracious host.  “If you want to join us tomorrow…?”

            “I’ll think about it,” I said, exchanging nods with Trowa and Rashid as we made our exit.

            “Ciao,” Duo said, waving breezily to the others.

            I didn’t realize we were still holding hands until Taylor yelled at us to knock it off.

            Duo let go of my hand to flip the guard off.

            We slipped into our cell and Duo pushed me against the wall.

            I raised an eyebrow at him.

            “We should celebrate,” he said.

            “Celebrate what?” I asked, trying to reverse our positions and failing.

            Duo smirked at me.  “You should try lifting more at the gym.”

            “Lifting is for pussies,” I informed him, dislocating my wrist to wrest it from his hold and taking advantage of his disgust to pin him against the wall.

            “You are so gross, Heero,” Duo informed me.  “Anyway, we should celebrate our nosy neighbor shutting the fuck up and minding his own business.”

            “And how do we celebrate that?” I asked.

            Duo smiled a decidedly wicked smile at me, and said, “You’ll just have to wait until tonight to find out.”

            Duo’s surprise that night involved a lack of clothing and a very warm mouth with a lot of suction.

            “You look stupid,” Duo informed me as we walked over to the showers the next morning.

            “Huh?” I said intelligently.

            Duo grinned, seeming far more pleased with himself than I should have allowed, but I just couldn’t seem to get annoyed with him.

            No one came over to talk to Duo that morning, so we could just stare at each other for as long as we liked with no interruption.

            “You had sex with Duo,” Wufei accused me at work.

            I dropped the book I was supposed to be shelving.  “So?” I said defensively, picking the book back up and shelving it properly.  “That’s what we do.  I’m his prison bitch.”

            Wufei snorted.  “No one with half a brain would believe that you two virgins were getting it on.”

            “I… uh… what?”

            “Don’t worry, there are very few people in this prison with half a brain.”

            I stared at Wufei for a long while, watching as he continued to shelve books as though we weren’t suddenly in a bizarro world where Wufei Chang was giving me a sex talk.

            “You know what Duo did while we were in solitary, right?”

            Only Wufei could find a way to make the change of subject even more uncomfortable.  “Yes.”

            “Those guys who attacked you-”

            “I said, ‘yes’, didn’t I?”

            “You know what he did, but you don’t want to acknowledge it.  Like with the drugs.”

            We weren’t even pretending to shelve the books anymore, staring at each other over the cart.

            “I’m not ignoring what he’s doing.”

            “Yes, you are,” Wufei said.  He was looking at me with concern.

            “I know he beat those guys up,” I said.  “When we got out of solitary, they were still in the hospital, and I knew it had to be Duo’s doing…”

            “Did you confront him about it?”

            “What was there to confront?”

            “So you think he was right?”

            I stared at him.

            “You put me on the right path, Heero,” Wufei said, his hands gripping the handle of the cart so tightly that they were completely white.  “During the Barton uprising, you challenged me and you set me straight.  You stopped me from making an even bigger mistake.  I owe you greatly for that.”

            “You don’t owe me anything.”

            “I do,” Wufei said swiftly, his tone brokering no argument.  “I… I wish you could do the same for Duo.  Straighten him out.  But it might already be too late.”

            “Wufei.”

            “He killed a man.”

            “He’s killed many men.  We all have.”

            “In prison, Heero.  Before you came.  How do you think he got to where he is now?”

            I knew it was strange that Duo was heading one of the most powerful gangs in the prison.  I’d already been in ESUN Max for a few months and I was still at the absolute bottom of the totem pole.  Even my stunt of breaking a guy’s arm hadn’t earned me any credibility, since the prison rumor mill said that Wufei the martial arts master had actually done it.

            I knew that Duo had to have done something more than just rough up a few guys to get where he was now.  I knew it, but I didn’t put any more thought into it because I knew where that would lead.

            I knew all along what Duo did.  I just didn’t put it into words.

            Wufei did it for me.  “The old foreman of the dress factory was a sadistic man.  A Machiavellian type, better to be feared than loved.  He didn’t like Duo.  He tried to make Duo do humiliating things.  Then one day the man was dead.  Everyone knew it wasn’t suicide despite how it was made to look, but the guards didn’t pursue it.  Everyone knew it was Duo.”

            I sighed.

            Wufei watched me.

            “I love him,” I finally said.  “All of him, even… and if he was… it could have been self-defense…”

            “Heero.”

            “I know.”

            We went back to shelving books.

            I had resolved myself to have a talk with Duo when he got back from work, but as soon as he sauntered into our cell, we were both grinning stupidly at each other, no doubt having the same flashbacks of the previous night.

            “Hi,” Duo said, his smile a little shy.

            It pulled at my heart in a strange way.  “Hi,” I answered, his gravity drawing me into him.

            We kissed, Duo’s hands cupping my face as I clutched at his wifebeater, trying to pull him in closer.

            “I was thinking about you all day,” Duo whispered against my lips, stealing a breath before pressing another hungry kiss to my mouth.

            “I love you,” I breathed into his mouth, wanting to be closer.  My tongue moved against his, sliding deeper into his mouth.

            Duo groaned, pushing his groin into mine.

            A clanging on the bars of the cell had us pulling apart with a gasp, eyes flicking to the doorway.

            “Do you two need a timeout?” Hernandez asked, banging his nightstick against the bars again.

            “Does a timeout mean we get locked up together in a dark closet?” Duo asked.

            “You wish,” Hernandez said with a snort.  “Save it for lights out.”

            “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Duo muttered, begrudgingly pulling away from me.

            I felt cold.

            Duo walked over to his bunk and pulled out his cigarettes, lighting one up.

            Hernandez paused, then turned around and left.

            Duo was staring at the wall, puffing on his cigarette.  “Fucking Manfredo,” he muttered.

            I picked up a book from my things and ducked into my bunk.

            “I wonder what we’d be doing right now,” Duo said suddenly.  “I mean, if we’d never been arrested.  If we weren’t in ESUN Max.”

            “Having sex on the kitchen table?” I suggested.

            I could feel Duo smile, even though the edge of the bunk blocked his face from my view.  “I like the way you think, Yuy.”

            “It’s not so much thinking as being driven by hormones,” I said.

            Duo snorted, then was quiet.

            I turned the page in my book.

            “I think Hilde would be in the next room, sorting out the books,” Duo said after a while.  “You would be in the shower, cleaning up after a long day of hauling pointless crap around the yard.  I would be on the phone, telling Q a funny story about our day, and he’d be laughing and smiling at me like how he used to.  Then you’d come out of the shower, all wet and sexy in a towel, and I’d tell Quatre I had a pressing emergency, and he’d laugh at me as I hung up.  Then I’d kiss you for as long as I damn well wanted, with as much tongue and groping as my heart desired without anyone telling me to stop.  Until Hilde came out of her room and snapped at us to get a room.  We’d all laugh, and then we’d take her advice and scamper off to my piece of crap twin bed and do whatever we wanted for as long as we wanted.  Then Hilde would call us to dinner, and it would be steak.  A whole goddamn steak.  With fucking steak sauce.  And flavor and shit.  And I would eat it all.”

            “That’s ridiculous,” I said.  “Hilde would never make steak, she’s too cheap.”

            Duo let out a rough bark of laughter, then was quiet.

            I wanted to see his face, but I knew he didn’t want me to.  “That would be nice,” I finally said.

            “Yeah, nice.”

            The buzzer sounded for count.

            “You had sex with Duo,” Wufei muttered the next morning at work.  “Again.”

            “So?” I said, meaning to sound defensive but sounding appallingly dreamy, even to my own ears.

            “So you didn’t talk to him,” Wufei said, shoving the book logout sheet at me to check.

            “We talked,” I said.

            Wufei gave me a look that was probably how I usually looked when I was arguing with Duo.

            “About things,” I added.

            Wufei just kept staring.

            “Is that what it’s like when I do that?” I asked, shifting uncomfortably under his stare.

            “I learned from the best,” Wufei answered, his eyes still boring into me.

            “It’s annoying.”

            The corner of Wufei’s mouth twitched up in a grin.

            I sighed, flopping forward and resting my chin on the desk.  I felt young and naive under Wufei’s stare.

            “Heero?”

            I cast my eyes up at Wufei, noting that he was now looking at me with worry.

            “Did you finish checking the log?” Cunningham, the librarian, asked.

            “Not yet,” I said, sitting up and glancing down at the sheet in front of me.  “I’ll do it now.”

            The librarian just nodded absently, moving back into the stacks.

            I checked over the log and then filed it in the cabinet.

            Wufei was sweeping up around the reading area, gathering the dust into a dustpan.  He was always fastidious about keeping the library clean.  When he finished, he came back over to sit with me at the front desk.

            “Duo stopped running drugs through the factory.”

            Wufei looked at me skeptically.

            “That was part of the deal with Melcourt.  Duo took over the cigarette trade and the earth bounders took over the drug trade.”

            “Drugs, cigarettes, they’re both poison.”

            “Duo’s being pragmatic.”

            “That is not a word I would choose to describe him.”

            “Maybe you don’t know him very well.”

            “That is true.”

            “Duo’s not afraid to be the villain for the greater good.”

            “For the greater good of whom?”

            “You said the guy before him was a sadist.”

            “Are you saying that what Duo is doing is okay because he is not as bad as his predecessor?”

            “I don’t know anymore.”

            Wufei let out a disgusted sigh.  “Sex is making you stupider.”

            I couldn’t argue with that, nodding my agreement.  I felt like my brain was turning to mush.  All I wanted to think about was Duo.

            Duo smiling softly at me, partially obscured in shadow.  Duo’s fingers digging into my scalp as I wrapped my mouth around him.  Duo’s gasps and pants as I tasted every inch of his skin.  Duo’s nose pressed to mine, Duo’s lips whispering, ‘I love you,’ over and over, Duo, Duo, Duo, Duo…

            I thought about L2.

            Hilde laughing at Duo’s jokes.  Duo always coming out of the scrapyard covered in grease.  The warmth of the sun while we worked.

            I felt regret for the life I would never be able to get back.

            Then I thought of that little girl, holding out a flower to me and grinning, her little dog wagging its tail at her feet.

            One life for another.


	5. Chapter 5

            “L287Q9, L1243G,” Taylor said, looking at Duo and I before returning to the guard station.

            “Another shitty day,” Duo muttered, poking me in the side as we returned to our cell to get ready for showering.

            “Are you going to wash your hair today?” I asked as I peeled off my shirt.

            “I probably should,” Duo said, holding his braid up in front of his eyes for closer inspection.  “But it’s such a pain in the ass.”

            I gathered Duo’s shampoo and conditioner into our shower caddy.  “I’ll brush it for you.”

            “Thanks,” Duo said, wrapping a towel around his waist before sitting on my bed and trying to untangle his braid.

            I got his brush out of his box and sat next to him, carefully working it through the tangled, greasy strands.  After over a year of doing it, I’d gotten fairly proficient at not yanking Duo’s scalp.  “You let it go too long.”

            “Yeah, I know,” Duo said.  “It’s just such a damn process to wash it.”

            We both knew it would be easier if he cut it, but neither of us considered it an option.

            After I had brushed it out as smoothly as I could get it, we moved towards the showers.  The line was already dwindling.

            “Ooo, Maxwell, lookin’ fine!”

            Duo answered the catcalling with his middle finger, unfazed.

            We reached the front of the line quickly, moving under an unoccupied spray of water.  I helped Duo work the shampoo into his hair and rinse it out.  Next was the conditioner, which took a little more work.  We were the last ones out of the shower room.

            “That was a pain in the ass,” Duo said with a sigh, flopping on my bed on his stomach.

            “You smell good,” I told him, pushing his hair to the side and nuzzling his neck.

            “Well then I guess it was all worth it,” Duo muttered.

            I smiled, kissing his neck once before picking up his brush and working it through the wet strands.  We didn’t have much time before breakfast and work, so I brushed and braided his hair as quickly as I could.

            “What would I do without my faithful hair slave?” Duo said, sliding his arms around my neck.

            “Go bald,” I said, pressing a kiss to his nose before extricating myself from him and heading off to breakfast.

            “Good mor-” Wufei started to say as we headed towards the library together.

            “Good morning,” I replied.

            “Your face.”

            “It’s fine.”

            “Duo?”

            “He has a matching one,” I said, touching my black eye.

            Wufei let out a disapproving ‘tch’.  “What are you fighting about now?”

            “Nothing,” I said.  “We’re fine.”

            “You gave each other black eyes.”

            “That was last night,” I said, pausing in front of the library door and waiting for the guard to unlock it.

            Wufei shook his head, leading the way into the library.  He didn’t say anything else because he knew it would be pointless.

            Duo and I being together was just something that was, and it wasn’t going to change.

            The previous night’s fight had been nothing new.  I’d gotten angry at Duo for fighting with another inmate, he’d gotten angry at me for getting angry at him.  He’d taken a swing at me, and I’d taken one right back.

            It was how we communicated.

            Wufei passed me a broom, and I swept while he mopped up behind me.  After we finished cleaning, we pulled the chairs off of the reading tables and set them back on the floor.  The library was now open for business, though it got very few visitors during the day since most prisoners were at their work detail.  A small group of older guys who were now in ‘retirement’ were our only regulars.

            No one was here now, so Wufei and I went in between the stacks and did katas while Cunningham sat at the front desk and read a book.

            It was relaxing to go through the choreographed movements with Wufei.

            After over a year in ESUN Max, I valued this quiet time in the library.  Wufei was the wind beside me, a silent companion.  It was like we were free, if only for a moment.

            Then the moment was over, a wheezy laugh signaling the entrance of a visitor.

            Prison life was all about stolen moments.

            “Had another domestic with the Missus?” asked Frank, one of the old-timers who frequented the library.

            I took the book he was holding out to me and signed it out.

            “He’s got a nasty right hook, huh?” Frank continued, taking the book back from me.

            I watched him head out of the library.

            At dinner time I sat with Wufei, wanting the quiet after a day of being inundated with people’s unsolicited opinions of Duo’s and my relationship.

            To my surprise, Duo came over to us, dumping his tray down next to mine.

            “Hello, Duo,” Wufei said.

            “Hey, Wu,” Duo answered, settling a hand on my knee.

            I studied the tension in his eyes, deciding he’d probably had as an annoying day as I had, and kissed him on the cheek.

            Duo’s eyes crinkled in a smile, and he turned to me.  “Hi.”

            “Hi,” I said, turning my attention to my food and starting to eat.

            Duo squeezed my knee and turned to his own food.

            Wufei was giving us his usual irritated look of moral superiority, which we both ignored.

            Duo was quiet for once.

            After dinner we just went to our cell and sat on my bunk, Duo’s back pressed to my chest while I rested my chin on his shoulder.

            Neither of us cared about the fight from the day before.  We’d sorted it out with our fists, and it was over.  But in prison, your business was everyone else’s business.  There was no privacy, and our somewhat questionable conflict resolution methods were always being put under the microscope.  It got tiresome for Duo, while I didn’t care.  I didn’t have an image to maintain.

            “Feeling guilty?” I asked, kissing his neck.

            Duo snorted.  “Yeah, apparently I am the poster child for domestic abuse,” he said, leaning his head back so he could look at me.  “As the abuser, of course, despite this,” he said pointing to his black eye.

            “Looks like it hurts,” I said, smiling at him.

            “Like a motherfucker, you dick,” he said, smiling back.

            “Mine doesn’t hurt at all,” I said, flicking him in the nose.

            Duo’s nose scrunched up.  “Inhuman robot bitch,” he said, twisting his neck a little and kissing me chastely before turning back around and leaning into me like I was a recliner or some other kind of inanimate sitting assistant.

            I hugged Duo a little tighter, breathing in the clean scent of his hair.  I felt relaxed, despite being treated like a chair.

            “Did you have a nice day at work, honey?” Duo asked, his tone languid as he traced the veins in my arms with his fingertip.

            “It was swell, dear,” I replied, drawing out a snort from Duo.

            “Why hello there, Huang,” Lee-from-across-the-hall said in a loud voice.

            “Fuck me,” Duo muttered, pulling away from me and going to stand by the sink.

            A moment later Huang appeared, walking slowly and glancing into each cell.  He eyed Duo for a long moment, like he knew we’d been breaking the rules, but then he turned back around and moved back towards the front of the cellblock.

            “Thanks, Lee,” Duo said, glancing over at the other man.

           “No problem,” Lee said amicably.  He’d become a decent neighbor since Reynolds had moved out of his cell.

            There’d been less tension in general between the earth bounders and the colonists since Duo and Melcourt had reached a mutual agreement about their separate smuggling empires.

            Of course, there was still tension with Reynolds, but he was now halfway down the block in a private cell, no longer breathing down our necks from across the hall.

            That didn’t mean that we let our guard down.  Just a month ago I’d had a group of thugs come after me when I’d been alone in the supply room getting some paper for the library.  There had been a guard I didn’t know well right outside the door, probably paid off.  Fortunately, the men hadn’t been particularly smart, announcing themselves before they’d even made visual confirmation of their target.  I’d climbed onto a shelf and hidden behind a bunch of boxes before they’d even opened the door.

            Thus I’d avoided going to solitary, and had thoroughly enjoyed the confused look on the guard’s face when I came out the door ten minutes later.  He couldn’t say anything without revealing he’d been in on it, so I gave him a Duo-esque smile as I went back to the library.

            Duo had been ready to go and slit Reynolds’s throat after that.  The guards had actually left us alone, letting me deal with Duo until he was calm enough to not be homicidal.  I think they’d been scared of him.

            They were right to be.

            The next morning was Saturday.  That meant visitors’ day.

            “You getting’ all spruced up for queenie?” Duo asked, watching as I brushed my hair in front of the mirror.

            “Yes, I only brush my hair for very special people,” I said.

            “That’s for sure,” Duo commented, coming over and running a hand through my hair.

            I glared at him through the mirror.

            Duo just smiled, attempting to smooth my now-mussed hair back into place.  “You need a haircut,” he murmured, poking at the hair that was now dangling below my ears.  “Seriously, long hair is not a good look on you.”

            “I’ll keep that in mind.”

            “Yuy, you got a visitor!” Taylor called.

            Duo sighed, pressing a kiss to the nape of my neck.  “See you later.”

            “Of course,” I said, ruffling his hair as I walked by and earning a scowl.

            Relena was waiting in the visitor’s room, leaping to her feet when she saw me and crushing me in a hug.

            I patted her on the back, still not used to all the hugging.

            “What happened to your eye?” she asked with a sudden gasp as she studied my face.

            “Duo,” I said dismissively, taking a seat.

            Relena frowned slightly, but then shrugged it off.

            “Great news!” she said after she’d sat down.  “I’ve got some cabinet support for my proposal.”

            I eyed her carefully.  “To get us pardoned?”

            Relena nodded happily.  “I don’t mean to get your hopes up, and I think it’s going to take a year or so to go through, but… things are looking really favorable right now!”

            Ever since I’d walked through the doors of ESUN Max, I hadn’t been able to imagine a future outside of these walls.

            I still couldn’t.

            I nodded at all the appropriate times, and Relena left seeming pleased.

            Duo was playing cards with his associates when I got back to Cellblock D.  I nodded to him in passing, then went to the guard station and asked Taylor if I could go to the meeting room.

            Trowa let me in the room, looking bored.

            “Heero, thank you for joining is,” Quatre said, smiling at me.

            I didn’t answer, sliding into a seat next to Trowa.

            Quatre went back to his teaching, the drone of it lost on my ears.  I tried to meditate on what he was saying, but I didn’t feel anything.

            I wished that I could find fulfillment in spirituality like Quatre had.  A purpose.  A higher calling.

            “You look like you’re having an existential crisis,” Trowa murmured to me as everyone was getting up to leave.

            I glanced at him with a raised eyebrow.

            Trowa stared back.

            “What would you do if you could get out of here?” I asked.

            Trowa paused for a moment, then said, “Go back to the circus.”

            I nodded.

            Quatre came over to us with Rashid.  “I’m glad you could come, Heero.”

            I shrugged.

            “Next time you might even pay attention,” he added with a smile.

            I snorted.  “Maybe.”

            “You seem troubled,” he prodded gently.

            “It’s nothing,” I said, and took my leave.

            “Really?” Duo murmured, cheek pressed to my bare chest as the sweat cooled from our skin.  “Nothing’s wrong?”

            “Why does everyone think that something’s wrong?”

            “You’re easy to read.”

            I tugged on his braid to annoy him and got bitten for my efforts.

            “Were you attacked by a wild animal?” Wufei asked the next morning at breakfast.

            “Duo.”

            “So the answer is yes?”

            I spooned another glop of green stuff into my mouth.

            Reynolds walked by our table without a glance in my direction.

            “He’s been quiet lately,” Wufei commented, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

            I spooned up the last of the green stuff and swallowed it.  “What would you do if you got out of here?”

            “I’m not getting out of here,” Wufei replied without hesitation.

            “But if you did?”

            “It’s not like you to talk in hypotheticals.”

            “Just making conversation.”

            “You don’t make conversation.”

            “Relena’s trying to get us out.”

            Wufei stared at me for a long moment with a complex expression on his face.  “There’s nowhere for me to go but here,” he finally said.

            I thought about the last time I’d seen him on the outside, stiff but proud in his Preventer’s uniform.  It had been a peace summit in the Sanc Kingdom, and I had left Duo and Hilde behind at the scrapyard to attend as Relena’s specially requested bodyguard.

            It was the only time I left L2 after Duo and I got together.

            Wufei had stood behind the commander, next to Sally on the platform.  Everyone applauded Une’s speech, and the crowd began to shift towards the garden area, where refreshments would be served.

            On the stage, Sally said something, a wicked look on her face.

            All of Wufei’s formalness seeped away as he started flailing around angrily at her.

            I carefully guided Relena through the crowd, my eyes occasionally glancing back at the two preventers.

            ‘They look happy,’ is what I thought.

            Being a preventer agent had suited Wufei.

            “You would turn it down?” I asked, staring at Wufei across the table.

            “This is where I belong,” Wufei said, picking up his tray and moving across the cafeteria.

            “Is it where I belong?” I asked, following behind him.

            Wufei put down his tray and turned to face me.  “No,” he said.  “Absolutely not,” he added, as though the no hadn’t been strong enough.

            “I don’t see the difference between you and me,” I said as we walked back to the cellblock.  “We committed the same crimes.”

            Wufei looked at me thoughtfully.  “No, Heero, I don’t think that we did.”

            “We were sent orders by the same people, we did the same kind of missions,” I said.  I wanted to understand his point, but I didn’t.

            “You didn’t do what I did,” Wufei said, shaking his head.

            We were back in Cellblock D now, sitting in my cell.

            “You say that, but I don’t see the difference,” I repeated.

            “I helped Barton try to drop a colony on the earth,” Wufei said.

            “I shot down Noventa and the other pacifists…”

            “You were manipulated into that.”

            “Weren’t you manipulated by Barton?”

            “No,” Wufei said.  “I knew exactly what I was doing.”

            “I knew what I was doing.”

            “You didn’t know that you were shooting down the pacifists,” Wufei said, shaking his head.  “Treize made sure of that.”  There was a slight hesitation in his voice as he spoke Treize’s name.

            “Does it matter who I was shooting down?”

            “I think it does,” Wufei said.  “We were child soldiers following orders.  I don’t think we can be held responsible for that part of it.  It’s the decisions we made on our own that we have culpability for.”

            I felt Duo’s arms curl around my neck as he rested his chin on the top of my head.  “Is he carrying on about what a horrible person he is again?”

            “He’s trying to,” Wufei agreed.

            Duo sighed, shifting to press his cheek to mine.  “Babe, seriously, who cares?”

            “I’m just thinking about things,” I said.

            “Well stop,” Duo said.

            “Stop thinking?”

            “Yeah.”

            I rolled my eyes.

            Duo bit my ear.

            “What the hell is with you and biting lately?” I asked, yanking on his braid.

            “It gets you all riled up and sexy,” Duo said, soothing the bite with his tongue.

            “I will be going now,” Wufei said, giving us both the side eye as he walked past us and back into the cellblock.

            “Bye, Chang,” Duo said distractedly.  He shifted, the only warning I got before he sank his teeth into my neck.

            “Enough with the biting,” I growled, shifting my weight and catching Duo off guard so I could push him against the wall.

            Duo just grinned, unbothered.

            I was thrumming with adrenaline, just like he wanted.  Shoves easily turned into touches and kisses and further bites and licks.

            Duo’s attempts to be quiet weren’t very good attempts, and we were quickly told to knock it off by a passing guard, with a strong suggestion that we separate for a bit.

            “God, what I wouldn’t give to fuck whenever we want,” Duo muttered, lighting a cigarette and stepping outside the cell in a show of appeasement.

            “That’s really romantic, Duo,” I said, lying on my bunk and pulling out a book.

            “You know what I mean,” Duo growled, adjusting his pants before leaning against the door to smoke.

            I started reading.

            This of course made Duo angry.  “How can you just lay there reading your dumbass books?!” he demanded, flailing his cigarette around and sending ash everywhere.

            I considered ignoring him, but that would only rile him up further.  A frustrated Duo was a vengeful Duo.

            I put the book down and gave him a comforting smile.

            “Fuck, why are you so creepy?” Duo muttered, looking away.

            “Hn,” I said, picking up my book again.

            “I’m going to the gym,” Duo said, putting out his cigarette.

            I made a vague gesture that I assumed he would take as acknowledgment of his statement.

            Trowa came to see me.

            “You can’t tell him.”

            I rested my book on my chest, eyeing him looming in the doorway.  “I don’t recall telling you.”

            “You didn’t have to.”

            “And who am I not telling?”

            “Both of them.”

            I put the book aside and sat up.

            “Hope is the most dangerous thing in this place,” Trowa said.

            I raised an eyebrow at him.

            He raised one back at me.

            “I think Quatre is stronger than you think,” I said.  “And Duo, well…” I started, only to realize that I was not going to tell Duo what Relena was doing.

            Trowa stared at me.

            I stared back.

            “I’m going to talk to Relena,” Trowa finally said, turning and leaving.

            Months passed.

            “That motherfucker,” Duo growled, grinding his spoon into the table at dinner.

            I watched Reynolds continue to smirk as he walked across the cafeteria.  “Do I want to know?”

            Some of Duo’s lackeys shook their heads vigorously.

            Duo had started to put a divot into the table.

            “Love,” I said, touching his hand.

            Duo didn’t look at me and didn’t stop.

            I wasn’t allowed to physically stop him because it ‘made him look bad’, and if Duo ‘looked bad’ his enemies would perceive him as weak.

            “Duo, love,” I said a little more firmly.

            His blue eyes flicked to mine, consumed in rage.

            I stared at him.

            “I’m going to gut that pig in his sleep,” he snarled.

            “That’s fine,” I said.  “Have you planned the logistics of this mission?  You’ll need to sneak out of our cell, and into his and back without alerting the guards.  You’ll also need to either take him out quickly or find a way to keep him quiet during the gutting.”

            Duo was nodding his head thoughtfully, some of the anger seeping out of him.

            The lackeys all just stared at us both in horror.

            Duo put his spoon on his tray, clearly done with eating for the night even though half his food was left over.  “I think I’d want him to be alive,” he mused.

            “Maybe you could inject him with something,” I suggested.

            The lackeys all looked pale.  They weren’t very good felons.

            I got called over to the guard station as we walked back from dinner.

            “Oo, someone’s in trouble,” Duo taunted, slapping me in the butt before going into the cellblock.

            Hernandez rolled his eyes at Duo, then focused on me.  “Yuy, what have you heard?”

            I stared at him, waiting for an explanation as to what he was referring to.

            “Well?” he prodded.

            I continued to stare at him.

            “You are every bit as weird as Maxwell says you are,” Hernandez said, looking away unnerved.

            I shrugged.

            “So…” he tried.

            I was getting tired of his ineptitude.  “What are you talking about?”

            Hernandez shifted uncomfortably.  “You know.  About Reynolds.  And Maxwell?  And the guy from Cellblock B?” he asked, getting more and more uncertain at each addition.

            “It has nothing to do with me,” I said.

            “Yeah, but… I mean Duo is your… partner?” he said, his eyes getting shiftier.

            I stared at him.

            “You can uh go now…” Hernandez said, trying to sound authoritative.

            I shrugged and walked back to my cell.

            Rashid was standing outside the door.

            I nodded to him.

            Duo and Quatre both stopped talking when I walked in.

            “Am I interrupting your secret business talks?” I asked, picking up a book and lounging on my bunk.

            “Kinda, yeah,” Duo said, as Quatre said, “No, not at all.”

            Quatre shook his head ruefully.

            “We’ll talk later, Q, yeah?” Duo said.

            “Yes, that will be fine,” Quatre said, heading out of the cell.  “Nice seeing you, Heero.”

            “Things so bad you’re calling in the Muslims?” I asked after he’d gone.

            “Can’t I just talk to an old war buddy?”

            I didn’t say anything.  It was obvious to anyone that Duo hadn’t been on good terms with the other gundam pilots since I’d arrived at ESUN Max.

            There was an energy running through the prison that was unmistakable.

            It reminded me of L1 before the launch of Operation Meteor.

            Wufei and I minded our own business in the library.

            Trowa was annoyed.

            He didn’t say anything about it, it was just obvious.

            “Have we suddenly become very interesting?” Wufei finally asked when Trowa joined us for yet another meal.

            Trowa just shrugged.

            “Or did you finally realize that you’re not Muslim?” Duo asked, plopping down next to me.  “Hi, baby,” he murmured, nuzzling my cheek and getting an immediate reprimand from one of the guards.

            “And now Maxwell is joining us as well?” Wufei asked, his feathers clearly ruffled.  “At least Barton doesn’t talk, even if he’s creepy.”

            Trowa looked at me and we both snorted.

            “Wu has a point, though,” Duo said, squeezing my knee.  “You two and your little telepathy act is creepy as fuck sometimes.”

            “Duo, we do not have telepathy,” I explained for the hundredth time.  “We are very observant of nonverbal cues and-”

            “Christ, Heero, just admit that you’re both psychics so we can all move on already.”

            I rolled my eyes.

            “This is not becoming a regular occurrence,” Wufei said, glaring at Trowa and Duo.

            “Who’d want to eat with your boring asses every day?” Duo asked with a shake of his head.  “I just wanted to know why Tro has suddenly stopped eating with the Muslims and has moved on to eating with Boring and Boringer.”

            I eyed him.  “Keep talking like that, Duo.”

            “Or else?” Duo asked, an impish grin spread across his face.

            I shrugged, turning my attention back to eating.

            “You two are such a lovely couple,” Trowa commented, spooning some green slop into his mouth.

            “Aren’t we though?” Duo agreed, making a kissy face at me.

            I ignored him.

            Wufei was looking very disgruntled at having his quiet meal turned into such a spectacle.  “Seriously, this is not going to become a regular occurrence, correct?”

            Trowa continued to eat silently.

            “Get the stick out of your ass, Wu,” Duo said, squeezing my knee again.  “You’re in this, too.”

            Wufei didn’t say anything after that, though he still looked disgruntled.

            “In what?” Trowa asked after a long pause.

            Duo shrugged and Wufei concentrated on eating.

            Trowa turned to me.

            I didn’t know anything more than he did.

            It didn’t bother me.  It wasn’t my fight; my battle was over.

            That’s what I wanted, anyway.

            “Heero?” Duo murmured sleepily into the back of my neck later that night after lights out.

            “Mm?”

            “I think you’re gonna have to make a choice soon.”

            I stayed quiet, waiting for him to continue.

            “I like how things are now.”

            I rolled over so I could face him.  “What do you mean?”

            Duo studied my face thoughtfully in the dark.  He had excellent night vision.

            I tugged on his braid, curling the end of it around my hand.

            “I like that you can read your books, and you can do your stupid Asian zen bullshit with Wufei, and you can lay here in bed with me every night, all that without getting bogged down with all the prison bullshit,” Duo said.  “I know it’s not… L2… but…” Duo sighed, trying to collect his thoughts.

            I ran his hair through my fingers, feeling the soft texture.

            “The war took so much from you,” he said quietly, touching my cheek with his hand.

            “It took from everyone.”

            Duo shook his head.  “It took everything from you, Heero.  Look, I get why all you wanted afterwards was a quiet life.  I obviously wanted the same.  I would have… it would have been good.  You, me, Hilde.  Hauling scrap and shit.  I could have lived the rest of my life like that and…”

            “You would have been happy,” I finally said, because I knew the words were stuck in Duo’s throat.

            Duo didn’t answer, but his fingers were trembling against my cheek.

            I raised my own hand up to cover his.  “You’re not happy now.”

            “Who could be in his hellhole?”

            “I’m sorry, love.”

            “You never apologize, and now you’re apologizing for something that isn’t your fault?”

          I thought about it.  “Maybe this is what we deserve for what we’ve done, but it isn’t what I wanted for you.”

            “I know about Relena’s deal.”

            I eyed him.  “How?”

            “I’m not as stupid as you think I am.”

            “I don’t think that you’re stupid… most of the time.”

            Duo snorted.  “Asshole.”

            I squeezed his hand.

            “I’m not getting out of here, Heero,” he said quietly.

            “I don’t think any of us are.”

            “Don’t be an idiot,” Duo said.  “Get the fuck out while you can.”

            “The deal isn’t going to go through.  Manfredo would never-”

            “It’s Relena, Heero.  She can probably shit out rainbows and resurrect unicorns.”

            “Why would any of that be useful to us in our current predicament?”

            “The point is, when the opportunity comes, take it.”

            “And why wouldn’t you?”

            “They’re not going to let me out.  I’m in too deep.  But you and Trowa…”

            “Why only Trowa and I?”

            “It doesn’t matter, Heero, Jesus, just listen to what I’m saying.”

            “What are you saying?” I asked, because it wasn’t clear at all.

            “I’m saying,” Duo said, his voice rising in agitation, “that you don’t give up a chance on going free because I’m stuck here.”

            “Freedom or Duo?” I asked, trying to laugh.  “No competition.”

            “Heero,” Duo growled, because he knew exactly what I was thinking.

            “Life without you isn’t life at all,” I said quietly.

            “I knew you’d say some dumb shit like that,” Duo said with a sigh.  “Don’t be stupid about this.”

            “No one is getting out of here,” I said firmly.  “I have consecutive life sentences.  I am a terrorist and a murderer, and I deserve to be here.”

            “You should have more faith in Relena.  And yourself.”

            I rolled my eyes and kissed his nose.  “The guard will be coming soon.”

            Duo sighed again.  “Babe.”

            “It’s not going to happen, so there’s no reason to think about it.”

            The glow from the guard’s flashlight was getting closer.

            Duo disappeared up into the top bunk.


	6. Chapter 6

            It had been five years since I’d arrived at ESUN Max when the announcement was made.

            Manfredo had lost his bid for re-election.  Under the new president’s cabinet, Relena had been promoted to secretary of state, and had pushed hard to get all those indicted for war crimes to have a sentence review.  She had succeeded.

            The gundam pilots were at the center of the media circus.

            Inside the prison, things went on as usual.  Requests from reporters poured in every day, but I mostly ignored them.

            Duo was especially getting a lot of attention.  He had been set up as the poster child for why gundam pilots were dangerous and should never be released into the wild.  Duo, who usually reveled in attention, also turned down all requests for interviews.

            “Don’t want to fuck up your chances of getting out,” he told me one day as he hung up the payphone.

            “I’m not getting out,” I told him as we walked back to our cell.

            “I’m the one not getting out,” Duo said with a bitter laugh.

            “It looks like Hilde’s getting out,” I said, changing the subject because I didn’t want to have the same argument again.

            “Yeah,” Duo said, brightening up.  “Sally, too, though she might have to serve another three years, which is stupid.”

            “It’s something,” I said.

            “Yeah,” Duo agreed, looking at me sadly.

            I wondered if either of us would ever forget the peaceful future that had stretched out before us on L2.  It wasn’t like me to be so sentimental; really, it wasn’t like Duo, either.  Maybe things wouldn’t have gone as perfectly as we imagined, but we never got the chance to find out, and now we never would.

            Duo had had additional charges laid on him for the prison riot of three years ago.  One of those charges was murder in the first degree.

            I had been in my cell when it all happened.  Duo had made sure of that.

            Prison politics were complicated and I stayed out of them like I stayed out of politics during the war.  What it came down to was that several guards had been involved with something with the earth bounders, some colonists had been killed because of it, and the colonists had staged a riot in revolt.

            The entire prison was put into lockdown for weeks afterwards.  Duo was in solitary for months.

            He came out of it haggard and depressed, and I knew more than ever that I didn’t want to be without him.

            It was illogical.  It was unhealthy.  But it was my choice.  All my other choices had been taken away from me, but this one was mine.

            I chose Duo.

            “I was offered a sentence review,” Wufei said suddenly on a quiet day in the library.

            I finished shelving the books in my hands, as Trowa appeared from behind the stacks.  He had started working in the library after the riot.

            We both stared at Wufei.

            He shifted uncomfortably.  By now he was used to Trowa’s and my nonverbal communication, so it wasn’t that that was bothering him.

            “I turned it down,” he finally said.

            Neither of us were surprised.  Wufei had also been indicted on additional charges after the riot, so his chances of going free were not good.  Then there was his martyr complex.

            “I don’t see the harm in just having the hearing,” Trowa tried.

            “This is where I belong,” Wufei said firmly.

            “No one belongs here,” Trowa said.

            Wufei shook his head.  “What I’ve done…”

            It was an age old argument from all of us.

            We were all silent.

            I thought again of seeing Wufei and Sally in Sanc.  I thought about all the good the Preventers had done in their short period of existence.  I thought of all the good that they could have done if they hadn’t been disbanded.

            I thought of Wufei coming out of solitary after the riots.

            “I don’t understand,” I’d said to him at the time.  Wufei stayed out of prison politics even more than I did.

            “It was justice,” he’d replied simply.

            Wufei continued to be the loner of the prison after that, but I noticed that the other inmates seemed to look at him with greater respect.

            Wufei had made his choice.

            Trowa was next.

            “They scheduled my hearing,” he told Wufei and I at dinner one night.

            “That’s good,” I said.

            Wufei nodded his agreement.

            It was left at that.

            A week later, all of the former gundam pilots were called into the lawyers meeting room.

            Relena was waiting for us with a man in suit.

            “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet with you all sooner,” she apologized after exchanging pleasantries with everyone.

            “No problem, queenie,” Duo said with a shrug, leaning back in his chair.

            Relena smoothed her pants suit, then looked up to address us all.  Her eyes briefly met mine before moving on.  “I wanted to explain to you why we are having these hearings to reevaluate your sentences.”

            “Some of us haven’t been offered hearings,” Duo commented, rocking back and forth on the back legs of his chair.

            “I know that, and I apologize for the delay,” Relena said.  She looked tired, but there was a kind of glow about her as she spoke.  Relena felt strongly about what she was doing.  “You and Heero should be hearing from the parole board soon.  As will Wufei and Quatre.”

            “I already said no,” Wufei said flatly.

            “As did I,” Quatre said.

            We all turned to look at him.

            “Are you crazy?” Duo asked, but he didn’t seem surprised.

            “Sometimes,” Quatre said with a nod.

            My outlook on Quatre had changed after the riot.  Well, not so much changed as broadened.  Different things that I already knew about Quatre came together and formed a clearer picture.

            Trowa had always assumed he had been protecting Quatre from other prisoners.  He had played guard duty, and helped Quatre live insulated from daily prison life.

            What was really happening was that Quatre was trying to keep Trowa out of prison life.  Trowa was kept out of Muslim business on the grounds that he wasn’t Muslim.  He was kept separate from the colonists because he was part of the Muslims.  In a place where the group you were in defined who you were, Trowa, like myself and Wufei, had found himself without an identity.

            When the riot went down, Trowa was in the cellblock the same as me, not in the gym where the colonists, Muslims, Christians, bikers, and anarchists all gathered to settle the score with the earth bounders and the crooked prison guards.

            Quatre led the Muslims into the battle.  He spent almost as long in solitary as Duo, but came out of it the same as always, smiling and gentle.

            “Q is the scariest motherfucker of all of us,” Duo had joked to me after he’d gotten out himself.

            I remembered fighting Quatre when he was piloting Wing Zero, and wasn’t inclined to disagree.

            Now he was telling Relena that he didn’t want a reduction in his prison sentence.

            “I blew up a colony,” he said.  “And I was a leader in the riot three years ago.”

            We all expected Relena to come out with the usual arguments about all the good we’d done, or about how we’d been too young during the war to know what we were doing.

            Instead, she said, “Well, this isn’t about you.”

            “What do you mean?” Quatre asked, tilting his head to the side inquisitively.

            “I mean that having your sentence reevaluated is not about you,” Relena said.  “It’s about all the guerillas and the soldiers who were locked up under the Manfredo administration without a fair due process.  We don’t want to give this injustice precedence.  People like Hilde Schbeiker have been locked up for more than five years simply because they were on the wrong side of the war, according to the ESUN president.  Justice is not about the president’s preference or opinion, and I will not rest until every injustice that man has wreaked on the earth sphere has been corrected.”

            “Hot damn,” Duo muttered, letting his chair drop back onto all four legs.

            “I see,” Quatre murmured, looking thoughtful.

            Relena blushed a little, trying to resume her poise.

            “I understand,” Wufei said finally.  “I will attend the hearing, and abide by the court’s ruling.”

            “I will attend my hearing as well, though I feel very strongly that I should carry out my full sentence as it stands,” Quatre said.

            “What about your family?” Trowa interjected suddenly.  “Your business?  Quatre, you have a whole life waiting on the outside for you.”

            “I gave up on those things a long time ago,” Quatre said, shaking his head.

            Trowa didn’t look convinced.

            We left the meeting in silence, all going our separate ways.

            “Hey, Yuy.”

            I ignored Reynolds, moving towards my cell.

            “Heard that Peacecraft bitch was getting you out of here.”

            I paused.  I didn’t like the way he was talking about Relena, but it seemed very macho and out of character for me to correct him on it.

            I smiled at him instead.

            Reynolds looked sufficiently confused and unnerved, so I went back to my cell unbothered.  He’d been less on the offensive the last three years since the riot.

            That didn’t mean that I let my guard down.

            Quatre came by with Rashid shortly after.

            “I’m worried about Trowa,” Quatre said.  “And you,” he added.

            “Have we done something worrisome?” I asked, setting aside the pen I had been using to write a letter to Une.

            “Not yet,” Quatre said, hovering in the doorway.

            I gestured for him to come in.

            Rashid stayed at the door.

            “We didn’t know that you were offered a parole hearing,” I said, sitting next to Quatre on the bottom bunk.  It was still on my mind.

            “Yes, well,” Quatre said.  “I thought Trowa might react how he did.”

            I studied his face.

            Quatre met my gaze.  “You understand what I’m doing.”

            I shrugged.

            “I’m not Duo,” Quatre said softly.  “But he and I… we’re not so different in some ways.”

            “Is that why you two work together so well now?”

            Quatre let out a huff of air and smiled.

            We hadn’t spent much time together since the riot.  Prison life was monotony, and my every day monotony was working and eating with Trowa and Wufei, then going back to my cell to read and be with Duo.

            Quatre and Duo spent a lot of time together, heads bowed in secretive meetings.  The Muslims were a force to be reckoned with in the prison, up there with the colonists and the earth bounders.  The close alliance between Quatre and Duo had tipped the scales in the colonists' favor, and things had been more peaceful, albeit tense between the colonists and the earth bounders.

            It didn’t really matter to me.

            “Heero, let me speak plainly,” Quatre said.  “We all want you and Trowa out of here.”

            “Should I feel hurt that you don’t want us around anymore?” I asked, unable to resist the lure of sarcasm.

            Quatre shook his head.

            “Trowa doesn’t get it,” I said.  “Why you edged him out of the group, why you chose Rashid over him.”

            “But you do.”

            “The same reason Duo kept me out of his business.”

            “At least you understand.”

            “I really don’t.”

            Quatre’s eyes crinkled with concern.  He reached out suddenly, covering my hand with his.

            I stared him down.

           “You understand,” Quatre said, unfazed.  “You understand perfectly well.  Duo’s good at playing the villain, even when it runs contrary to his heart.  You know that.  You know why he does it.”

            “To protect me,” I said.  I hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

            “So don’t let it all be in vein,” Quatre continued, squeezing my hand tightly.  “What he has sacrificed, it has all been to give you the peace you were desperately searching for after the war.  Your battle is finished, Heero.  Take your rest.”

            “I’m not getting out of here,” I said, taking my hand back.  “I have two life sentences to serve, so even if that’s reduced by half…”

            “Don’t stay here for Duo,” Quatre said.  “That’s not what he wants.”

            “I’m telling you that it’s not an option.”

            “Will you at least encourage Trowa to do his best at his parole hearing?”

            “Trowa doesn’t have a reason to stay.”

            “If he’s the only one to get his sentence reduced…”

            “You think he would refuse it?”

            “He’s the only one of us without a major charge against him,” Quatre said.  “I’m just afraid that he’ll feel some sort of loyalty towards the rest of us…”

            “I won’t allow it,” I said.

          Quatre smiled, standing up.  “That’s all I needed to hear.  I hope you understand that the same goes for you.”

            I was tired of repeating myself, so I said nothing as he left.

            The parole hearings started.

            Wufei’s life sentence was reduced to forty years, the brunt of his sentence coming from his involvement in the Barton uprising.  His involvement in the prison riot had also added some years.

            Wufei was mostly just confused about it.

            “I’ll be almost sixty,” he murmured.  “How can I start a life from there?”

            I thought about my unfinished letter to Une about restarting the Preventers.  If Wufei had been able to get out sooner, along with Sally…

            It didn’t matter anymore.

            Why was I thinking about those kinds of things, anyway?  The outside world had nothing to do with me.

            Quatre was next.  His sentence held.  He would spend the rest of his life in prison, despite the tearful outcries of all forty of his sisters.  He had blown up a colony, and while he could have pled insanity, he chose not to.

            Quatre smiled at the decision.

            Trowa was next.  Trowa, who had spent most of the war infiltrating OZ and the Alliance, had mostly just espionage charges brought against him.  He had a clean record in prison after his slightly rocky induction, and had stayed out of the riot.

            His sentence was reduced to fifteen years, with the possibility of parole in another five years.

            Trowa seemed to be having a hard time processing it all.

            “Holy shit,” was Duo’s reaction.  “Barton, you might actually be getting the fuck out of here.  You know, before you’re an old man like Wufei.

            Apparently Catherine was already preparing his room with the circus.

            “Cathy, it’s going to be at least another five years, and that’s only if I get parole,” Trowa murmured exasperatedly into the phone.

            It was the most emotion I’d seen in him for a long time.

            My hearing was scheduled next.

            “Good luck, babe,” Duo said, sticking his rosary beads around my neck and giving me a lingering smooch in front of everyone.

            The guards didn’t even yell at him for once, and I was whisked away to my hearing.

            The entire process was surreal.  I sat before the panel, listening to them read recommendation after recommendation that I be released.  There were reports from guards in the prison, but then there were also reports from politicians and former military leaders.  Unlike my trial, things like Noventa were glossed over, and instead words like “hero” were repeated over and over.

            “In light of the service you have performed for the Earth Sphere, and for serving as a model prisoner for the majority of your time served, this panel recommends that your sentence be reduced to ten years, eligible for parole in one year from now.”

            It didn’t make any sense.

            “What happened?” everyone kept asking, but I didn’t answer.

            “Dammit, Yuy, quit being catatonic, it couldn’t have been that bad,” Duo said.  There was hope and there was fear in his voice.

            Prisoners were standing outside of our cell, staring in anxiously.

            I stopped pacing the room.  “Ten years,” I finally said.

            There was a collective gasp from the spectators.

            “Fuck, Heero, you already served half that.”

            “Up for parole in a year.”

            “No fucking way!” came a voice from outside.

            “Congrats, man.”

            “How the hell did Yuy win the lottery like that?”

            Duo was quiet.

            I wished we were alone in his room on L2.

            He finally walked over to me, ignoring the catcalls as he wrapped his arms around me in a tight hug.  “Just keep your nose clean and you’ll be out of here in a year,” he whispered.

            “Yeah.”

            Duo’s hearing was last.  It was the shortest hearing, taking about five minutes.

            Somewhere inside, I’d been hoping for the impossible.

            “Looks like I’m stuck with Quat for the rest of my life,” Duo said, flashing me a sardonic smile when he got back.

            I was conflicted.

            I realized I needed to be constantly assured by Duo’s presence.  I sought him out at every meal.  I followed him to the gym and the TV room, even when I didn’t want to be in either of those places.  I just needed to be near him.

            “Christ, Heero, can you give me two seconds to myself?!” Duo finally snapped at me at dinner.

            Everyone sitting near us fell silent, then started up with the hooting and demands for a fight.

            I just took my tray and went over to Wufei and Trowa.

            “Pathetic,” I heard Reynolds say as I passed by.

            I couldn’t really argue with that.

            After count, when we were locked in our cell, Duo sat at the desk, silently writing.

            I couldn’t explain what I was feeling even to myself, but I knew that I wanted Duo to stop ignoring me and come closer.

            “Quit starin’ at me, you’re putting holes in the back of my head,” Duo finally said, not looking up.

            “Duo,” I said.  It came out whinier than I expected.

            Duo snorted.  “If people only knew what the great Heero Yuy was really like.”

            “What’s that supposed to mean?”

            “It means you’re a needy bitch.”

            “A needy… bitch…?” I repeated.

            “A needy bitch,” Duo agreed.

            “And you’re not?”

            “Nope.”

            “Please,” I said.  “You are the neediest of the bitches.”

            “Ha,” said Duo without any humor.

            It wasn’t right.

            “Duo…” I said.

            “Fuck off, I’m busy.”

            I knew exactly what he was doing, but it didn’t mean I had to accept it.  “I’m not leaving yet.”

            “Okay, and…?”

            “So why can’t we just be together like always instead of you pushing me away?”

            “Who the hell is pushing you away?  You’re just being annoying.”

            “If we were to survey the entire prison on who the annoying one in this relationship is, I am one hundred positive that the result would not be me.”

            “Keep talking like that and try your little survey again.”

            “Duo.”

            “Jesus, Yuy, give it a rest!” someone yelled from down the cellblock.

            “See,” Duo said, looking smug.

            Things didn’t get better.

            Duo was being Prison Duo all the time, even when we were alone.  He barely spoke to me, was never around unless we were locked in, and stayed in his own bunk every night.

            I felt like the last little piece of happiness I’d been holding onto was gone.

            People like me weren’t meant to be happy.

            I tried to think about leaving ESUN Max, but the outside world had stopped existing for me a long time ago.

            Relena was ecstatic.

            I’d always have a place in Sanc, but if there was anywhere that I would be more out of place, I couldn’t think of one.

            “Be thankful,” was Wufei’s attempt at comfort.  “Having sex with Duo made you stupider.  Perhaps you can regain some of your intelligence.”

            “It’s the same thing Quatre did to me,” Trowa pointed out.  “You’ll get over it once you’re out of here.”

            “Quatre kicking you out of the Muslims and Duo being an asshole are two very different issues.”

            “How so?”

            “Quatre was just your friend.  Duo is my-”

            Partner.  Lover.  Soulmate.

            Trowa rested his hand on my shoulder.  “He’s doing you a favor.  You can’t be together after you get out.”

            “We could…”

            “It’s time to start living again.”

            I didn’t know how.

            “Pushing me away is stupid,” I informed Duo after weeks of answering his silence with silence.

            Duo shifted in his bunk, but didn’t answer.

            “I found you on L2 and everything seemed right for the first time.”

            “You ran away.”

            I was surprised by the response.  “I came back.”

            There was silence again.

            “I don’t feel right.  It’s not right when you’re not with me.”

            “Shut up and go to sleep, Heero.”

            I listened to Duo shift again in his bunk.  Even after twenty minutes, I could tell he was still awake.

            “I love you,” I said into the dark.

            “Just shut up,” Duo said in a tight voice.

            So I did.

            “I’ve got you an apartment a couple of miles from the palace…” Relena was telling me excitedly in the visitors’ room.

            I tried to listen.  I tried to imagine it.

            “And I was talking to my chief of security about a job-”

            “Relena, it’s not a sure thing that I’ll be paroled.”

            “It’s just in case,” Relena said, grinning at me.  “It’s better to have a plan, don’t you think?”

            “Sure,” I said.

            I didn’t care.

            My parole hearing was still so far away, yet drawing closer every day.

            “Duo, you play the villain better than anyone, but I know this isn’t what you want,” I murmured to the bunk above me in one of my nightly soliloquies.

            With Duo mostly giving me the silent treatment, I’d found myself talking more and more.  It was annoying.  I wanted Duo’s voice to fill the silence, not mine.

            “It hurts,” I finally said after two months of it.  “I don’t understand why that is.  You’re not shooting me with your gun… again.  You’re not stabbing me or hitting me or kicking me.  Why does it hurt?  Why is it so hard to breathe?  It makes no sense.  I don’t understand it, and I need you to explain it to me, and you won’t.”

            Duo shifted but didn’t say anything.

            “You’re depressed,” Trowa informed me.

            I stared at him.

            He nodded.

            I squinted.

            Trowa shrugged.

            I sighed.

            Trowa nudged me with his elbow.

            “Stop that,” Wufei said from across the library, sounding annoyed.

            “We’re not doing anything,” Trowa said.

            Wufei’s nostrils flared, and Trowa and I both smiled, a small upraising at the corners of our mouths.

            I wondered if this was my punishment.  I didn’t particularly believe in god or karma or fate, or any of those archaic-seeming concepts, though I also couldn’t disprove that they were real.  Every time I found something good, it was taken away.  I’d never given it much thought, but now in the presence of Duo’s never ending silence, I had nothing to do but think.

            Perhaps a higher being was trying to tell me something.

            I tried going to Quatre’s morning Quran study, but as I listened to him preach, I didn’t feel anything.

            “You almost sound human,” Trowa commented when I told him about it.

            “You sound like Duo.”

            “Well you’ve always seemed kind of superhuman to all of us.”

            “I was genetically experimented on and enhanced.”

            “There’s more to it than that.”

            “Well there was also the special training…”

            Trowa snorted.  “It’s more than just your physicality that makes you what you are.”

            Sometimes the others’ admiration of me made me uncomfortable.

            I was the same as them, wasn’t I?

            I still couldn’t see beyond the walls of the prison.

            I knew that I wasn’t meant to leave this place, no matter what everyone else was saying.


	7. Chapter 7

            “You’ll get yours,” someone hissed in the dining hall.

            I turned around, but I couldn’t find the source.

            “Stop overanalyzing it,” Wufei said, shaking his head.

            I found my bath towel torn to shreds in my cell.

            “That’s… odd,” said Trowa.  “Maybe Duo…?”

            When I got sheets from the laundry and started making my bed, black ink screamed ‘murderer’ at me, splashed across the fitted sheet.

            Wufei and Trowa didn’t say anything, but their eyes narrowed and they started taking in their surroundings like they were in the middle of a war.

            “What the fuck is this?” Duo said one night, breaking his usual silence.

            I put down my book and sat up.

            Duo stood at the sink, looking annoyed.

            I waited.

            Duo turned slowly, blue eyes meeting mine.  “Something you want to tell me?”

            I missed those eyes.

            “Heero.”

            “What?”

            “Why is there a dead rat in our sink?”

            “Is that what that smell is?”

            “Is this for me or for you?”

            “Probably me.”

            “I’ll kill that motherfucker tonight.”

            “Who?”

            Duo stared at me.

            “I’m not sure that it’s Reynolds.”

            “Who the hell else would it be?!” Duo snapped.

            “You okay in there, ladies?” one of the guards asked, passing by the cell door.

            “Just peachy, Johnson,” Duo ground out.

            Johnson eyed us for a lingering moment, then moved on.

            “So you’re just going to keep the rat?” I asked, my tone quiet.

            “Yeah, so I can shove it down Reynolds’s throat as I watch the light leave his eyes,” Duo answered in an equally quiet tone.

            “Charming,” I said.

            “Where did he even find this thing…?”

            I wanted to touch him.

            Duo caught me staring and immediately turned his back.

            “Don’t be like that,” I said softly.

            “I’m not being like anything.”

            “We could be happy for a little while.”

            “Happiness doesn’t exist in this place.”

            “You’re really overdramatic sometimes.”

            Duo sighed, and I could see the longing he felt in the way he held himself.

            “I miss you, Love,” I said.

            “That’s stupid,” Duo replied.

            Then he stopped talking to me again.

            Sunday was visiting day.

            Relena seemed to glow as she told me about all the arrangements she had made for my release.

            Duo sat several tables over, animatedly talking to Hilde.

            “That will be you soon,” Relena said, looking at Hilde with a smile.

            “Relena.”

            She shook her head.  “Heero, I know you’re not ready for this, but it’s happening.  You need to start thinking about your future.”

            “I can’t,” I said simply, leaving it at that.

            “That’s why I have to do it for you,” she said, her smile taking on a sad cast.

            “How’s Hilde?” I asked Duo as we headed back to our cell.

            “Good,” Duo said.

            “Good,” I replied.

            We both went about our business separately from there.

            “Relena has a point,” Trowa said at dinner.

            “Have you started planning for your future?” I asked, expecting a negative answer.

            “Cathy started preparing a trailer for me,” Trowa said, with a soft smile that only ever appeared when talking about his sort-of sister.

            “She is aware that your parole is not for another five years, correct?” Wufei asked, squinting at Trowa.

            “She said she wants to make sure that everything is just right for my arrival.”

            “Maybe Wufei should start planning for his release, then,” I said.

            Trowa side-eyed me.

            “Heero, you’re being ridiculous,” Wufei informed me.  “It’s not like you to run away from something.”

            “That’s what I’m doing, isn’t it…” I mused.

            So I tried to imagine a future.

            I was still drawing a blank.

            “Well, you know that you can go to Sanc,” Quatre suggested over tea in his cell.  “Why don’t you start from there?”

            “I haven’t been to the Sanc Kingdom since I was a teenager,” I said.

            “That wasn’t so long ago,” Quatre said, a bit of sardonicism mixed into his smile.

            “All I remember from living there during the war was awful school uniforms and Dorothy Catalonia’s eyebrows.”

            Quatre spit out his tea.

            I shrugged.

            When he finally collected himself and stopped laughing, Quatre said, “I’m going to miss you.”

            “We barely talk to one another.”

            “It doesn’t make you any less important to me.”

            “All right then.”

            Quatre touched my arm, smiling warmly.

            For all that I knew him well, sometimes I felt like I didn’t understand the man in front of me at all.

            “Q, you gotta minute?” Duo asked, sticking his head into the cell.  He nodded briefly at me.

            “Well…” Quatre said, glancing at me.

            “I’ll get going,” I said, standing up and taking my leave.

            Prison politics had nothing to do with me.

            I tried not to think too much about how someone had peed in the cup that held my toothbrush or that my spare set of clothing had gone missing.

            Eight months until my parole hearing…

            “I want to get a tan,” Trowa decided as we all sat in the library, bored out of our minds with nothing to do.

            Wufei snorted.  “You’ll probably burn up as soon as you set foot outside of the walls.”

            “I can’t remember what the sun feels like,” I mused.

            “It feels good,” Trowa said.

            I thought he might be right.  “Maybe I’ll get a tan, too.”

            “Yuy on the beach, I can’t even picture it,” Wufei said, shaking his head.

            “Wearing some Hawaiian print board shorts and sunglasses, surrounded by voluptuous ladies in bikinis,” Trowa said thoughtfully.

            “That is the weirdest thing that has ever come out of your mouth,” Wufei told him.

            “Try picturing it, though,” Trowa said.

            I tried.  I laughed.

            They both looked startled.

            I shrugged.  “It was funny.”

            “It really wasn’t,” Wufei said, but he was looking at me with a certain amount of fondness.

            “What do you want to do besides get a tan?” Trowa asked.

            I thought about it for a moment, still seeing the ridiculous picture that Trowa had painted in my mind.  “Swim.  In the ocean.”

            “Sticking with the beach theme, then?”

            “Yeah,” I said.  “I’ve never been snorkeling…  Well, not for the intention of looking at fish, anyway.”

            It suddenly seemed like there were a lot of things I’d never done.  And for the first time, I dared to think about myself doing them.

            Maybe I did have a future.  I didn’t know what it was, but there was something out there for me.

            Maybe.

            The siren started buzzing, and the prison went into lockdown.

            I sat on my bunk, waiting for Duo to come back from the dress factory.

            The guards did a count, not saying anything about Duo’s absence.

            Dinner was delivered to our cells.

            Duo still hadn’t come back.  Even if he had been held up with closing up the dress shop, he should have been back in the cell by now.

            “Why are we in lockdown?” I asked Huang when he came to collect my dinner tray.

            Everyone had been asking, but the guards were silent.

            Huang looked at me, and I knew that it was Duo.  He took my tray and walked away.

            No one in Cellblock D had seen what happened, but it was clear that Reynolds and Duo were not here.

            Rumors started passing down the cells.  Duo had disappeared from work.  He had been tense and angry all day.  He hadn’t come back, and then the alarms had gone off.

            Lockdown was released the next morning.

            Quatre followed me into the shower room, Rashid looming behind him.

            “Heero, I want you to hear this from me,” Quatre said softly, talking so that no one else could hear us without straining.

            I stared at him stonily.  I could see him falling apart, and I knew he’d been involved, and I knew it wasn’t good.

            “Duo and Reynolds agreed to meet yesterday,” Quatre said.  “I had two of my men backing him up and-”

            “I don’t care about the details,” I said.  “Where is Duo?”

            Quatre hesitated, then looked me in the eye.  “He was hurt.”

            “Where is he?” I persisted.

            “They took him to the hospital,” Quatre said, taking an unconscious step away from me.

            “So he’s alive.”

            “Yes, but…”

            “But what?”

            Quatre took another step back.  “It’s not good.”

            “Is he dying or what?  Say it clearly.”

            “The doctor in the infirmary sent him to the hospital because she said he probably wouldn’t make it through the night.”

            “I see,” I said, turning off the shower without bothering to wash myself.

            “Where are you going?” Quatre asked, watching me carefully.

            “To my cell,” I said.

            “Heero…”

            “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

            At breakfast, the rumors were flying freely.  Reynolds was in solitary for killing Duo.  Duo was in solitary for killing Reynolds.  They were both dead.  They were both in solitary.

            Trowa gave me a look.

            “I’m fine,” I said.

            He didn’t believe me.

            Work moved at its usual slow pace.  I went about my day as usual.

            “What are you planning?” Wufei finally asked.

            “Nothing,” I said.

            “You really expect me to believe that?”

            “I don’t care what you believe.”

            Everyone was so somber towards me.

            I carried on like always.

            At night, after I was safely locked away in my cage, I allowed my mind to focus on the task at hand.

            Quatre, Wufei, and Trowa all sat with me at breakfast.

            “Don’t do anything foolish,” Quatre cautioned me.

            “I’m not doing anything.”

            I don’t know why they couldn’t believe me.

            I got called into the warden’s office before lunch.

            “Yuy, Maxwell listed you as next of kin,” Hernandez said, his voice tight as we sat together with Warden Prescott.

            I stared at him.

            “So you are supposed to make any medical decisions for him, but as you are a ward of ESUN Maximum Security Prison, that responsibility has been passed on to the warden,” Hernandez continued.

          “I’d like to update you on his condition, and take into consideration anything you have to say about his care,” Prescott said, studying my face.

            It took me a moment.  “Duo’s alive?”

            The warden hesitated.  “No one’s told you anything?”

            I stared at him.

            “We were told to keep everything quiet,” Hernandez explained.

            The warden nodded.  “Yes, we don’t want another riot.  Yuy, I need to ask for your discretion in exchange for this information.”

            “Duo’s alive,” I repeated.  I realized my hands were shaking.

            “Yeah, Yuy, even being shot in the back isn’t enough to take out Maxwell,” Hernandez said, trying to grin but it looked more like a grimace.

            “He was shot,” I said.  There were no guns in the prison.

            “Just calm down, Yuy,” Hernandez said carefully.

            “I’m perfectly calm,” I replied, meeting his eyes evenly.

            “Oh, really?” Hernandez said, shifting nervously.

            “I guess your reputation isn’t entirely undeserved,” the warden murmured.

            I turned my gaze on him.

            He didn’t look away, but I could tell he wanted to.

            “How is Duo?” I asked, because that was all I really cared about.

            “He hasn’t woken up since he was shot, but the doctors are optimistic,” Prescott explained.  “They could tell he’s a fighter.”

            I waited.

            “The problem is the damage to his spinal cord.”

            “Where is the damage?”

            The warden looked down at the file in his hands, consulting some handwritten notes.  “The thoracic nerves.”

            ‘Legs,’ was my first thought.  Hips, abdomen, trunk…  Bowels and bladder…  Sexual function…

            Duo would hate that.

            “When will they know?” I asked.

            “When Maxwell wakes up.”

            I nodded.  I knew that.  It had been a stupid question.  I needed to think more clearly.

            Hernandez was looking at me anxiously, while the warden just looked wary.

            “How?” I finally asked.

            “We don’t know how Reynolds got the gun into the prison,” Prescott said.  “All we know is that he did, that he shot Maxwell in the back three times, and was still standing over the body when two guards arrived on the scene.”

            “He had help,” I said.

            “We’re investigating.”

            “I want to see Duo.”

            “You know that’s not possible.”

            I breathed carefully.

            “Yuy, I want to keep you apprised of Maxwell’s condition, and if any issues with his care come up I will consult you,” Prescott said.  “But most of all, I hope that you will keep your upcoming parole hearing in mind and continue to conduct yourself in an appropriate manner.”

            I smiled at him.

            Prescott cringed, then tried to pull himself back together like he hadn’t.

            “Of course, Warden,” I said.

            Trowa and Wufei were both looking anxious when I came back to the library.

            “Duo’s alive,” I said.

            They both looked relieved.  It was comforting.  Sometimes I thought that they hated Duo, that they’d written him off.

            I realized that they were both looking at me expectantly.

            I shrugged and started checking in books.

            I didn’t understand why everyone was so worried about me.  It was Duo they should be worried about.  My Duo, who gave me purpose and life again, lying unconscious in a hospital bed, probably paralyzed or worse.

            I had to stay calm and think clearly.

            So I acted as usual.

            I wondered how long I would have to wait.

            Relena flew in for a special visit that Sunday.

            “I’ve gotten Duo the best doctor in the States,” she told me, trying to smile.

            “Thank you,” I said.

            She looked at me and she knew.

            “Take care of yourself,” she said, giving me a lingering hug before leaving.

            I nodded, trying to smile for her.

            It only made her look sadder.

            The colonists were without a leader, but it didn’t take long until Hobbs, Duo’s second-in-command, stepped into his vacant shoes.

            ‘Gotcha,’ I thought.

            Faking sick was easy enough.  I stuck my fingers down my throat until I vomited.  The guards were still feeling sympathetic towards me because of Duo, who was now awake but a confirmed paraplegic.  They barely even questioned me when I asked to be taken to the infirmary.

            It was too bad that it was Huang who brought me there.  He always seemed like the most decent of the guards.

            When we turned a corner that took us out of sight, I snapped his neck before he even knew anything was wrong.  I stripped his uniform off and threw it on, taking off at a run.

            First stop was the ladies dress factory.  With Huang’s hat drawn low over my eyes, I strode in like I belonged there.

            Hobbs was in Duo’s office, as expected.  It was all so easy.  I don’t know why I ever thought that I had put my soldiering days behind me.  This was who I was.

            “You double-crossed him,” I said, stepping into the office and shutting the door behind me.

            Hobbs looked up in surprise.  “Yuy?  Where the hell’d you get that get-up?”

            “You told Quatre’s men that you would cover Duo, but instead you set him up for Reynolds,” I said.

            “Did I?” Hobbs asked, looking smug.

            “And now I’m going to kill you.”

            Hobbs snorted.  “Yuy, you ain’t shit.  You might have done a lot of damage in that fancy robot of yours, but in case you hadn’t noticed, your little toy is nowhere in sight.”

            I strode over to the desk and Hobbs stood up, looking down at me with a smirk.

            It wasn’t even a fair fight.  Hobbs was dead, and I needed to get out of there.

            I strode purposefully out of the office, shutting the door behind me.  I hadn’t even made it out of the dress factory when a panicked cry rang out.

            The guard at the door looked up suspiciously.  “What’s going on?” he barked.

            “I’ll watch the door,” I offered.

            The guard nodded, stepping into the factory, eyes inquisitive.

            I walked out the door and didn’t look back.

            I was halfway to solitary when the alarms sounded.

            Maynard was at the gate, talking into the walkie-talkie on her shoulder.  Two other guards were in the little glass booth that operated the gate.

            I knew what I had to do.

            When all three of them had been taken care of, I took Maynard’s keys and moved through the slim corridor.

            “Reynolds,” I said.  There wasn’t time to play hide-and-seek.  “Reynolds!”

            “So you finally came.”

            Reynolds was in the third cell on the right.

            I slid the key into the lock, turning it and throwing the door open.

            Reynolds was sitting on the bed, the only piece of furniture in the room.  He didn’t look so surprised to see me.

            This was the man who shot Duo.

            I shut the door behind me.  They would be coming soon.

            “Christ, you really are an animal,” he said, staring up at me scornfully.  There was no fear in his eyes.

            “I’m going to kill you,” I told him.

            “I know.”

            “Why did you do it?”

            “Do you really want to know?”

            I stared at him.

            “It hurts, doesn’t it?” he said, smiling at me.

            “Yes,” I said.

            “Good.”

            “He had nothing to do with your grudge.”

            “Collateral damage.”

            “I made a mistake when I shot down Noventa’s shuttle,” I said.  “I have paid for it over and over.  I will continue paying for it.  But you are not the one who gets to exact the price.”

            “You are a fool.”

            “Are those your last words?”

            Reynolds’s eyes narrowed into slits.  “I hope that every morning when you wake up, you suddenly remember why your faggot girlfriend isn’t next to you, and it kills you inside every damn time, because you know it’s all your fault.”

            “I’ll take the blame for a lot of things, but Duo?  That was all you.”

            “You killed my daughter, you smug sonofabitch!” Reynolds roared, rising to his feet.

            “What?” I said, because that didn’t make any sense.

            He was gripping the collar of my uniform now, staring down at me.  “She was on that ship, and you killed her for no damn reason!  You just cut her down like she was nothing!”

            The guards were coming.

            “I’m sorry,” I whispered, and snapped his neck.

            Reynolds crumpled to the floor.

            I stood there, hot tears streaming down my face.

            I would never escape the monster that I was inside.  I don’t know why I had even tried.


	8. Epilogue

            I was sitting in my locked cell, smoking a cigarette, when Martin came over, tapping the bars with his nightstick.

            “He’s here,” he said.

            I took a last deep drag and stubbed the cigarette out against my desk.

            “So I finally get to meet Mrs. Yuy?” Sanderson called from the next cell over.  He and I were the only current occupants of the two cells in Cellblock F.  Sanderson was a former cop who had to be kept away from the general population of the prison for his own protection.

            I was in F Block because the rest of the prison was terrified of me.

            Now we were going to have a third occupant in the quietest and most secure block in the prison.

            The gate opened and he came rolling in.  Built arms worked tirelessly to move him forward in his wheelchair.

            I realized I was gripping the bars of my cell door.

            “What a shithole,” Duo said with a snort.

            “I’ll pass that along to our interior decorator,” Martin said, rolling his eyes and walking over to my cell with his keys out.  “Yuy step back and try to wipe that drool offa ya mouth.”

            I narrowed my eyes at him but stepped back.

            We spent a lot of time together, so Martin just smiled at my threat and unlocked the door.  “Here ya go, Maxwell, home sweet home.”

            Duo wheeled himself into the cell, looking around before finally letting his eyes meet mine.  “Hey.”

            “Hey,” I said.

            “Get a room,” Martin said, slamming the door shut and locking it.

            Duo tossed his sheets and spare clothes on the bottom bunk.  “It’s too fucking quiet in here.”

            “Don’t worry, Sanderson never shuts up,” I said.  I was nervous.

            “It’s true, I don’t!” Sanderson called from his cell next to ours.  “Tell me you like baseball, Maxwell, because your crazy roomie doesn’t know shit about shit.”

            “Just ignore him,” I said, trying to smile.

            “Love it, man!” Duo called back, unfolding the fitted sheet and spreading it over the bed.

            Sanderson started prattling away, with Duo answering enthusiastically as he slowly made up his bed from his wheelchair.  Even Martin was getting in on the conversation.

            I stood in the corner uselessly.

            The three of them seemed to already get along grandly.

            I watched the way Duo moved.  He had been in the hospital for weeks, then moved to a minimum security prison where he could get physical therapy.  He had no feeling in his legs at all and it had been determined that he would probably never walk again.

            The warden had kept me updated on Duo’s status during my eight months in solitary.  It was all I asked for in exchange for being a model prisoner.  The warden very much wanted me to be a model prisoner.  I could always read the fear in his eyes when he was with me, no matter how good he was at hiding it.

            Duo finally turned his attention to me, and I was riveted.

            “So you volunteered to room with a cripple?” he asked.

            “Yes…”

            Duo stared at me.  “Why are you so nervous?”

            “I’m not.”

            “Ha.”

            I lit up a cigarette.

            “Since when do you smoke?”

            I shrugged, taking a drag.

            “Gimme,” Duo said, holding out his hand.

            I passed him the cigarette.

            “Shit, Heero,” he finally said, passing the cigarette back to me.

            “What?”

            “This isn’t what I wanted.”

            “You wanted to room with Sanderson?”

            Duo smacked me.  “I haven’t talked to you in a fucking year.  Turn off your smartass Heero Yuy self and have a conversation with me.”

            I nodded petulantly, sitting down on the bed because I felt weird towering over Duo.

            Duo shifted his chair so that he could face me.  “You were supposed to go free.”

            “I seemed to have gotten myself another life sentence, this time without parole.”

            “Yeah, I can read a newspaper, asshole.  I can’t believe you threw everything away for petty revenge.”

            “I think you’re mad because I took your revenge away from you,” I said, reading his expression.

            “Okay, but how fucking awesome would it have been if I took out Hobbs and Reynolds in this piece of shit cripple chair?”

            I couldn’t help but smile.

            Duo took my hand.  “I did everything I could to get you out of here…”

            “Thank you,” I said, because there was nothing else I could say.  “But this is where I belong.”

            “I just wanted you to be happy,” Duo said, and I could see him struggling with the emotion of it.

            “I’m happy enough,” I said, “now that you’re here.”

            Duo glared at me.

            “What?”

            “Look at me.  I’m… nothing.  I’m useless.”

            I shook my head.  “No,” I said.  “No, no, no…”

            “You’re dumb,” Duo muttered.

            “You’re dumb,” I replied.

            “I’m sorry for pushing you away…  Even if it was the right thing to do and you’re an idiot.”

            “I know we’re no good for each other,” I said, squeezing his hand.  “But nothing matters without you.”

            We both stared at each other, and it was like the last year and a half had all just been a bad dream.

            “Are you two done with the domestic drama, it’s kind of boring,” Sanderson called.

            “Yeah, I heard you two used to get into screaming fights and beat the shit outta each other,” Martin said, coming over to the door.  “We need more excitement in F Block.”

            “Give us a week,” Duo said.  “No, give us an hour.  I’m sure Heero will say something asinine within the next hour.”

            “I don’t say asinine things, you’re just sensitive,” I said.  “Martin, can you tell Finelli to double my cigarettes for this week?  And have him get me an itemized list of this month’s shipment before next week.”

            “Sure thing, boss man,” Martin said, giving me a fake salute before moving over to the main gate.  It was time for the changing of the guard.

            “Boss man?” Duo repeated, raising an eyebrow at me.

            I shrugged.  “Someone had to fill your spot.”

            Duo looked sad.

            I was quiet.  Everything was different now, and I didn’t know how Duo would take it.  We’d been allowed to exchange one screened letter a month with one another, but words on paper were just words, and now he was here in the flesh and I didn’t know what I was supposed to say.

          “So what do you do in here all day?” Duo asked, tired of the silence.  “You guys really never leave F Block?”

            “Can’t,” Sanderson said.  “I might get killed and Yuy might kill someone.”

            “I’m not going to kill anyone,” I said flatly.

            “How the hell did I get stuck in this lame ass cellblock?” Duo complained.

            “Because you’re defenseless in a prison full of people who want to kill you,” I said.

            “Do I look defenseless to you?”

            “A little bit, yeah.”

            Duo ran over my foot with his wheelchair.

            “F…uck…” I ground out.

            “What’s happening over there?!” Sanderson demanded.  “Am I missing something interesting?”

            “Maxwell ran over Yuy’s foot,” Clark, the new guard, explained.

            “All right, this is what I was waiting for,” Sanderson said gleefully.

            “Christ, Heero, it hasn’t even been an hour.”

            “I’m just saying that you can’t walk…”

            “I don’t need no goddamn legs to kick your ass.”

            “No, you actually do, because kicking requires legssss fuck ow!”

            “Bitch.”

            “This is going to be so entertaining,” Sanderson said to Clark.

            “I’ll get us some popcorn for tomorrow,” Clark said.

            I sat with my feet pulled up on the bed, glaring at Duo and Duo glaring back.

            Things felt normal.

            “It’s like you never left,” I said suddenly.

            Duo shook his head, getting that sad look again.  “Everything’s changed,” he said softly.

            “Has this changed?” I asked, reaching out and squeezing his hand.

            “I don’t know,” Duo said.  “You know I can’t…” and he stopped himself, looking upset.

            “I don’t care about that,” I said, leaning in and kissing his forehead.

            “Well I still love your stupid mass-murdering ass, if that’s what you wanted to hear,” Duo said, still looking uncomfortable.

            “It is,” I said.  “Because I’d understand…”

            “You did what you had to do,” Duo said, reaching for me.

            I let him pull me into a hug.

            “I just wanted to get you out of this world,” he murmured into my neck.

            “I know,” I said, burying my nose in his hair.  “But this is where I belong.”

            “Heero…”

            “Monsters belong in cages.”

            Duo pulled back, pressing his nose into mine and staring into my eyes.  “Yeah…” he finally said.  “I guess so.”

            I knew that things weren’t a hundred percent between us, but it didn’t matter.

            We had a lifetime to figure it out.


End file.
